


a piacere

by Arokel



Series: Symphony in E [1]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Classical Music, Coming Out, Endgame Oliver/Elio Perlman, Exactly one viola joke, F/M, Families of Choice, Gender Non-Conforming Character, Holidays, Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, Jewish Holidays, Juilliard, Just so many holidays, M/M, Minor Character Death, Musician Elio Perlman, New York City, Period-Typical Homophobia, Professor Oliver (Call Me By Your Name), Slow Burn, Sort of a two-steps-forward-one-step-back situation, Told mostly through holidays tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:42:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 116,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27638389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arokel/pseuds/Arokel
Summary: Elio goes to university, makes some friends, learns to love New York, and re-learns how to love Oliver.
Relationships: Elio Perlman/Original Character(s), Oliver & Elio Perlman, Oliver/Elio Perlman, Original Character(s)/Original Character(s)
Series: Symphony in E [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2162847
Comments: 441
Kudos: 274





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _A piacere: "at pleasure" - in music, the use (to a degree) of the performer's discretion with regards to tempo and style._
> 
> Strap in, folks, this is gonna be a long one. Hope y'all like original characters.

I ran from Italy like the wolf was at my heels. I couldn’t stand another summer at the villa, not when the memory of my summer with Oliver itched beneath my skin with the warming days. I couldn’t spend six weeks sharing a balcony with someone other than Oliver. As soon as I could be, I was gone; my family, my friends – none of it mattered in the face of the need to be _away_.

Summer in New York was miserable; sticky, smoggy, _oppressive._ I had been there once before, with my parents, in the autumn, and had liked it then, but Manhattan in July was as close as one could get, I thought, to hell on earth. There was nowhere to swim except for public pools, and riding a bicycle was likely to get one run down by irate motorists.

It was America in microcosm: at once everything I had dreamed it would be and nothing like I expected. The cars were bigger, the music was louder, the streets were wider, dirtier. The rattle-roar-hiss of the subway floated up through the storm drains only to be drowned out by the sounds of traffic and commerce.

I hadn’t told Oliver where I was applying to university, when he visited over Christmas, because he hadn’t asked. It felt silly, or childish, to bring it up, to say, I know you don’t want me, and I’m not running after you, but when I’m in New York, maybe we could get a drink.

Of course, I _couldn’t_ drink. In the city that never slept, the only people who seemed to be awake when I wanted to be were drunks, hookers, and the beleaguered purveyors of three a.m. necessities at the bodegas littering the city. There were no bookshops, no ice cream stores or coffeehouses; just clubs and bars I wasn’t old enough to enter. The city lights obscured the stars.

I spent the summer with a friend of my parents’, a professor at Columbia who insisted I call her Kathleen while I was in her home, “but if we see each other around campus, I’m Professor Chamberlain.” I didn’t tell her that Columbia’s campus was the last place I wanted to set foot.

Kathleen’s apartment was in Park Slope, on a tree-lined street full of old pre-war brick buildings. I spent most of the summer on her tiny balcony surrounded by her outdoor houseplants, transcribing music, reading books, and pretending I was back in Italy. I had visited Little Italy, a few times, when I had first arrived, but the food was almost unrecognizable and everyone spoke with American accents and peppered their words with American slang, which only made me homesick. Kathleen’s balcony, with its dappled shade and the tabby cat who hated me but liked the sun-warmed concrete, was the closest I could get.

Kathleen had been one of my father’s first assistants, back before I was old enough to remember. Then, she had been a tough-as-nails feminist scholar, my mother told me. She’d had no interest in a four-year-old who babbled at her in Italian and gleefully banged away at the piano during meals. Now, she was an imposing woman in her early forties, with a single streak of grey in her swept-back brown hair and an air of wry amusement that suggested she was merely humoring the rest of the world. She apologized over and over for having no piano on which I could practice and offered up the Columbia practice rooms for my use, but I declined. I didn’t know where Oliver was, but if there was a chance he was at school for the summer quarter, I couldn’t take it.

My parents worried about me; I knew, because I heard them calling Kathleen to check up on me each week. Oliver’s replacement had turned out to be a bore, and they missed me. Was I settling in alright? Had I made any friends? I should look in on Oliver; perhaps he could show me around.

When I did speak to them, I tried to be positive. No, I hadn’t met anyone yet, but there would be plenty of opportunities to make friends once the semester started. Oliver was out of the country; I didn’t know when he’d be back. New York was different than I had thought it would be, but I would adapt.

Culture shock, my father said. I’d get used to it. My mother asked if I wanted to come home.

The end of August brought orientation week and with it, the end of my sojourn with Kathleen and her transition to ‘Professor Chamberlain’ in my mind. Gone were the houseplants, replaced with the bare white walls of my room in the Meredith Willson Residence Hall and its view of Central Park.

All the literature I had read in preparation said that the Juilliard administration put the utmost care into the first-year roommate selection process, and in my case, at least, it seemed that care had paid off. My roommate, a violinist named Peter, was the child of an American diplomat and a Thai university professor who had spent most of his childhood in France. His mother had been recalled to the United States by President Reagan, so he had a four-year head start on me when it came to assimilating.

Peter was, at first glance, the most handsome man I had ever seen, tall and well-built, with striking features and an artfully-tousled combover. He was gregarious and open and spoke with a slight accent that could have been French. It didn’t go away when he spoke Thai, he told me, but I couldn’t tell the difference. He chose his words carefully, shaping each one like they were all equally important, and seemed never at a loss for the right ones.

Our initial conversational topics were mostly on the differences between our upbringing and the prevailing American cultural norms we now found ourselves subject to. French men didn’t touch each other as casually as Italian men, but Thai men did, I learned, and without any seeming discussion, Peter and I settled into a casual intimacy I hadn’t realized I’d been deprived of.

I did my best to make other friends, as well: Rebecca, a dance student who lived directly across the hall from us and complimented my Star of David necklace on our second day of orientation, and Gabriele, the other first-year student from Italy.

My attempt to befriend Rebecca went considerably more smoothly; Gabriele was unimpressed by America in general and what he called my ‘American affectations’ in particular. He kept to himself, and when I tried to appeal to our common instrument and nationality, he only said “how nice for you.”

Rebecca invited me along to her synagogue, and as I had nowhere else to be, I went. Her high school boyfriend, Daniel, couldn’t be there, she said; he was starting at Columbia and had to attend some sort of orientation event. He would be thrilled to learn I had lived with Professor Chamberlain; she was the head of the archeology department, where he wanted to major.

Daniel, true to Rebecca’s word, wanted to know everything I could tell him about Professor Chamberlain, which wasn’t much. “You should come to Columbia,” he agreed, when I told him about her insistence on offering me the use of their practice rooms. “With your dad being like he is, you’re going to be bored out of your mind in whatever freshman philosophy class they stick you in.” I told him I would think about it, though I knew there was no way I was venturing near Oliver’s home ground. If I could go four years without running into him, I would.

Having spent his entire life in Manhattan, Daniel knew all the bars around Juilliard that didn’t check ID, which I considered to be the most important part of our friendship. On Friday and Saturday evenings we would grab a few drinks, schedules allowing, and gripe about our classes and professors and roommates – though I had nothing but praises for Peter.

Peter proved to be all I could have asked for in a roommate. My mother cautioned me against putting all my eggs in one basket, but Peter seemed at least for the moment to be everything I needed. He taught me French and I taught him Italian, and he tried to teach me Thai but I was an abysmal student – partly because the syllables felt foreign in my mouth, and partly because I couldn’t think of Thailand without thinking of the San Clementi Syndrome and Oliver, and I tried my best never to think of Oliver.

Peter was more fashionable than I was, which proved to be a boon because we were also the same size. It began with Rosh Hashana, when I asked to borrow a shirt because none of mine seemed appropriate, but it quickly became Peter and I wearing each other’s clothes whenever we felt like it. Rebecca thought it was strange and told us we looked like a couple, but Peter and I insisted it was just her _American sensibilities_ and we had shared clothes all the time in Europe – which wasn’t strictly untrue, in my case, but I thought Rebecca could tell we were making fun of her.

When Yom Kippur rolled around, Rebecca, Daniel and I designated Peter an honorary Jew, and we entered Rebecca’s room having swapped shirts and holding hands. Daniel would have raised his eyebrows at it, I think, had Rebecca not elbowed him very sharply and handed him a glass of wine.

I considered telling Peter, sometimes, but something always stopped me. I liked what we had, and I knew that if _he_ knew, things would change. It took all my willpower not to give anything away when he admitted to me that his childhood nickname was _Peach_.

But secrets have a way of coming out, and it was only a few weeks into living together that Peter discovered mine.

I had brought Billowy with me to New York out of some pathetic sentiment, and it hung unused in the corner of my wardrobe. Once we began sharing clothes, it became inevitable that Peter would find it and ask about it.

I told him no, he couldn’t wear it; it would be too big for him, anyway.

So I didn’t wear it? No, I didn’t wear it. Then why did I have it? It belonged to a friend.

“What, did he die?”’

That was the easy answer, and the one that would dissuade Peter from asking any further questions, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak of Oliver as if he didn’t exist. “No, we just don’t… talk anymore.”

“But you kept his shirt.”

There was something suspicious in Peter’s voice, but he let the subject lie for almost two weeks.

It was late on a Wednesday night, and Peter and I had just returned from choir practice. Peter, for all his talent on the violin, was an awful singer, and delighted in making fun of what he called my “Vatican choirboy” voice.

“My parents used to let my girlfriend sleep over, back in high school,” he said, unprompted. I kept my eyes on my philosophy reading.

“Very modern of them.”

“The best times were when she didn’t even mean to stay over; we’d just be there talking so late it didn’t make sense for her to go home. But since she hadn’t brought anything to sleep in, I’d give her one of my shirts. And they’d always be too big for her, but I liked that, that she wasn’t naked but she was wearing something of mine.”

It wasn’t quite the same, but I thought of Oliver wearing my trunks the morning after we’d first slept together and the way it had turned me on, and I thought I could see where Peter was coming from. “Yeah, I get that.”

It was perhaps the wrong thing to say, because Peter caught my eye and the look on his face stopped me from returning to my book.

“Did he like it when you wore his shirt?”

The world dropped out from under me. In all my agonizing over whether to speak, I had never thought _he_ would be the one to – I’d never imagined he could _know_ , just by seeing a shirt in my closet and hearing me call Oliver a _friend_.

I considered lying, or denying any understanding of what he’d said. But that way lay a long nine months of lying and watching my words, in case there were others like _friend_ that seemed innocent on the surface but might serve as claxon bells of _gay gay gay_ to anyone who was listening for them. Better to face it head-on.

“Are you mad I didn’t tell you?”

Peter hesitated, thinking it over. That was a good sign, probably. Anger was a fairly uncomplicated emotion; if he needed time to parse things out there must be at least a little nuance to it.

“Have you been trying to sleep with me? With all the – touching?”

“What? Of course not. I mean you’re – you’re good-looking, but –“

Could I say that? Was that beyond the bounds of what he’d accept from me, now that he knew? American men didn’t compliment each other; I knew that, but Peter and I had always existed adjacent to those rules. Had things changed, now?

Peter crooked a smile. I tried not to search for relief in it. “Then I get why you didn’t.”

I let that smile and the silence after it hang between us for so long I could see he thought the conversation was over. But it was only once his back was turned to me that I could bring myself to say, “…yeah. He liked it.”

“Why don’t you talk anymore?”

I watched Peter’s back, searching for a tightness in the shoulders or a twist of the neck that might indicate an answer he was looking for, but his posture was relaxed, casual. It was as if he knew that if he turned, I wouldn’t be able to answer, so he was content to speak facing opposite walls.

“He got engaged.”

“And you didn’t burn it?”

I thought that would be the end of it – I _wanted_ that to be the end of it, because I didn’t want to think about Oliver. And I thought Peter wouldn’t want to think more about my torrid gay affair than he had to, which was fine by me.

But Peter had an insatiable curiosity and a need to live vicariously through other people’s heartbreak, so my determination to forget Oliver was quickly subdued by Peter’s determination to get me to talk about him.

I thought that perhaps if I was explicit enough I could shock him out of his interest, but Peter turned out also to have a _prurient_ curiosity and very little, it seemed, could shock him.

“You’re a sick fuck,” he told me, when I told him about Oliver and the peach. It stung, a little, but it was said with something like awe.

“I know.”

“You realize that’s like fucking _me_ , right?”

“It’s not at all like fucking you.”

Peter spread his thighs wide in his chair and raised his eyebrows in a comical come-hither expression. “Wanna find out?”

I snorted. Peter was attractive, but – thankfully – I felt no stirrings of desire when I looked at him, only a fondness I could best describe as _fraternal._ “No.”

“Good.”

Peter had a compulsive need to reassure himself that I didn’t want to sleep with him; he made those little comments so frequently it became almost a rote response from me: no, I don’t think of you like that. Yes, I still think you’re good-looking, don’t take it personally. But so long as he kept asking and I kept denying, Peter seemed content to keep sharing clothes and casual touches in the privacy of our room.

One evening, instead of answering, I told Peter about the dinner with the publisher in Rome, and the poet’s story about the androgynously beautiful Thai woman in the bar.

“Was there a point to that story?”

Not when I told it. And not really when he told it, either, come to think of it.

“Sounds like a fetishizing asshole, if you ask me.”

Yes, in hindsight. At the time, it had seemed romantic and exotic, but in the melting pot of New York City, I could see how ridiculous it had actually been. But regardless of whether I’d had any particular intent in telling the story, after that, Peter stopped asking.

The composition department was small but, I was assured by the faculty, tight-knit. My fellow first-year was Charlie, a flautist fond of saying “I thought it’d be more like _college_ , you know? They’ve just thrown us in the deep end.” There were others – three second-years, two third-years who seemed to be best friends, and a fourth-year obviously too wrapped up in academics to make new ones – but I was too shy to approach them, so I stuck with Charlie and endured his griping.

The first few months slid by in a haze of classes and lessons. My birthday came and went, with no more fanfare than a phone call from my parents and a muffin with a candle in it from Peter. I began to think that maybe I could do this for the next four years: keep my head down, hole myself up in practice rooms away from the world, and wake up in time to graduate. The prospect had its appeal.

Daniel and Rebecca broke up in early November. Neither of them would say anything about it save a dismissive “high school romances never last” from Rebecca, which I took to mean she had been the instigator. They were still friends, Daniel said, but he stopped coming by on weekends.

If I had one complaint about Juilliard, it was that the mandatory liberal arts classes were not up to the academic standards I’d become accustomed to in living with my father and his summer proteges. Peter only rolled his eyes at my complaints and said “okay, boy genius, help me with this essay, then.” Daniel took a different tack.

Come to Columbia, he told me, every time we saw each other. I could sit in on any of the survey classes and no one would even notice. Every time, I declined. Columbia was Oliver’s territory; I couldn’t cross that invisible line of demarcation running straight down west 114th.

But with Rebecca on my side of that line, crossing it began to look like the only way I could continue to see Daniel. So finally, midway through November, I gave in.

We were to meet in front of Daniel’s dorm and head from there to any club that would let us in. After making a fool of myself by asking no less than five students the way – I had to resist the vain urge to explain I was a clueless Juilliard student, not a clueless prospective teenager – I arrived at the steps of Hartley Hall, a handsome brick building which, Daniel said, had recently been renovated, but didn’t look it from the outside. They must have gutted it, then.

To my right, forming a solid brick L-shape, stood a similarly imposing green-roofed building, faced with some sort of pale stone and faux-columns. My eye was drawn to the statue out front, of a man in colonial dress. The simple inscription on the statue’s pedestal read ‘H A M I L T O N’ – presumably the revolutionary leader Alexander; he was a New Yorker, I remembered.

Despite my having gotten so turned around, I was still early for our appointed meeting time, so I wandered towards the statue for lack of anything more interesting to look at. Something about the name Hamilton niggled at my brain, but before I could catch it and examine it further, the very last person I wanted to see emerged from the center of the three doors, saw me, and stopped in his tracks.

If asked to describe the manner of Oliver’s approach, I would have been unable to come up with anything other than _trepidatious,_ overwrought as that sounded. It would have been comedic, watching him place each foot so gingerly on the shallow steps, if I hadn’t been frozen to the spot.

I should have turned and run, followed some unsuspecting student through the doors of Hartley and left Oliver on those steps, wondering whether to run after me. But I was caught, paralyzed at his advance like a gazelle spotted by a lion but too entranced by its grace and power to flee.

He stopped, a step above me, and shoved the hand not clutching a briefcase into his jacket pocket. “Elio.”

The Classics department, I realized. Hamilton Hall housed the Classics department. Daniel lived mere meters away from Oliver’s office, his classrooms, the building where he studied and taught and wrote and looked out those large windows onto the green beyond them.

I said nothing. I _could_ say nothing, faced with him. I searched for a ring, out of some masochistic curious impulse, but it was his left hand that he had hidden in the depths of his coat. Perhaps he had hidden it on purpose.

What was I doing here, he asked. I was waiting for a friend, I said. “I’m sure he’ll be out in a second.”

He asked how I was, and I said I was fine. I couldn’t bring myself to inquire after his welfare in return. I didn’t want to know that he was well, that he was happy, that wedded bliss was all he’d imagined it would be – or worse, that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, that he regretted it, that he missed me –

“Elio!”

Daniel bounded towards me, long legs skipping stairs in his haste.

“Have you been waiting long? Sorry, I should’ve just told you to meet me later; class went long – oh, hey, Professor Katz, I didn’t know you knew Elio.”

Oliver – _Professor Katz_ , the graduate teaching fellow Daniel had spoken so rapturously of and I’d never made the connection, _stupid_ – opened his mouth in preparation for some deflection or other, but Daniel spoke over him. “Come upstairs with me. I’ve got to drop this stuff off and change and then we can head out. Is that what you’re wearing?”

I looked down at myself and saw Oliver follow suit. “Yeah?”

As a concession to the cold, I had worn the customary coat, scarf, and gloves, but, flushed from my crisscrossing search of campus, I had unbuttoned the coat, exposing the flimsy shirt beneath. I fought the urge to button it back up to hide from Oliver’s gaze. So what if he saw? Let him look. Let him see what he no longer had any claim to.

“Dude, I know I said dress sexy, but if you unbutton that shirt any further it’ll fall off. It’s _November._ ”

Should I change? Nothing of Daniel’s would fit me, but maybe –

“Nah, you look good. Doesn’t he look good?”

Oliver gave a sort of jerky nod.

“See, you’re perfect, never change. But hold tight while I do, because next to you I look like a total dork. Oh, also, I invited Anna, is that okay? Elio?”

Daniel was the kind of person who, if you asked him for his life philosophy, probably would have said something like “always live in the moment” or “don’t think too hard”, and I liked that about him. He had no patience for daydreaming, either, of which I had a terrible habit. In that instance, of course, he couldn’t have known that my thoughts had never been so focused on the present moment, and more particularly on Oliver’s face when Daniel had called me _sexy_. I thought of Daniel’s room and the renovation of Hartley Hall and how _gutted_ was the only word to describe what I had seen flash through Oliver’s eyes, and the way his hand had tightened on the strap of his briefcase. I wondered if, hidden in his pocket, he had felt the ring bite into his knuckle.

Early on in our friendship, Daniel had discovered that while a mere _Elio_ wouldn’t snap me out of my fugues, a sing-songed _Elioelioelioelioelio_ would. He used it to his advantage now, and I watched all the color drain from Oliver’s face.

Served him right, I thought, but it was a shaky satisfaction. I tore my gaze from his and asked, in response to the last thing I could remember Daniel saying, “who’s Anna?”

Anna sat next to Daniel in Oliver’s class and had overheard him mentioning our plans to another student, and the ever-gregarious Daniel had extended the invitation. I saw no reason to deny him the opportunity to make a new friend, and I was too distracted by the fascinating play of emotions over Oliver’s face as he listened to put up much of an argument anyway.

Was there a reason Oliver was still there? It seemed odd for a professor to stand by and listen while his student discussed sneaking into a club unless he had a reason to stay. Was I that reason?

“Killer, I’ll go grab her. Be right back; don’t go anywhere. See you Tuesday, Prof.” And he was gone, bounding steps carrying him across the small patch of grass and up the stairs into Hartley.

I called a reflexive “later” after him.

It was only once the words had left my mouth that I realized what I’d done. _Later_ was Oliver’s word, his careless, insouciant farewell. I had stolen it from him just like I’d stolen his shirt and he’d stolen my postcard, a reminder that once we’d had each other. I had taken his _later_ and made it mine, made it a part of myself, because he had taken part of me with him when he left and I’d needed to find something to fill that gap.

I couldn’t bring myself to look at him.

Alexander Hamilton loomed above us, regally imposing and distant, his bronze gaze fixed on the horizon of an imaginary sunrise, the dawning of a young, new-fangled nation. This was not my country, not my _world_ , not the place I had come to know like I knew my own body. This was Oliver’s territory, and I had adopted his catchphrase in the hopes that with it might come some of his false confidence.

And it had, until it was faced with the man himself.

“So you say _later_ now, huh.”

I shrugged.

“I could have sworn I remember you saying was _arrogante._ ”

“My parents kept saying it, after you left. Guess it rubbed off on me.”

It was only half a lie; of all the American expressions my father’s assistants had left behind over the years, _later_ was the only one I had made any effort to pick up.

Oliver’s confirmation that they bid him _later_ on the phone rather than _goodbye_ sent an unpleasant twinge through me. It wasn’t fair of him to keep up an inside joke with my family, when I had lost him so thoroughly.

“You still talk to them?” I had known he had, though my parents had made a commendable effort to hide his calls from me. They knew I wanted nothing to do with him.

But Oliver didn’t know I knew, and we were bound to this dance of pleasant fictions now, until Daniel returned and released me from my obligation to stand there and Oliver from his to stand with me. Then we could say we’d caught up and made amends and never speak to each other again. Daniel would just have to get over his breakup and come visit me.

Sometimes, Oliver said. More now that I wasn’t there.

Maybe he did know, then.

“Did they tell you I was coming here?”

“Yes.” But he’d heard it from Professor Chamberlain, too; he’d been her teaching assistant the year before and she was like a mentor to him. I agreed that she was lovely.

There followed the usual stilted how-have-you-beens: was I enjoying Juilliard? Yes, though it kept me too busy for much else. Were my classes interesting? Some of them, but I missed debating the Classics with my father. Had I considered cross-registering at Columbia next semester? Not really.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Busy, I guess.”

Daniel, the agent by which the universe had decided to torture me, now became my savior, reappearing at a more sedate pace with a girl I assumed to be Anna in tow.

Anna was petite, blonde, and wholesome, with the sort of kind, open face that foretold a Midwestern accent.

In actuality, Anna spoke with an entirely unexpected Boston twang and equally unexpected bluntness.

“Well, damn, now I feel overdressed. If I’d known we were all unbuttoning our shirts that far I’dve worn a more interesting bra.”

Daniel assured her that she looked perfect as she was and no unbuttoning was necessary, with a haste that spoke of something beyond a desire to preserve her modesty. “Elio just wants women to buy him drinks.”

Oliver frowned. “Should you be going to bars?”

“Don’t worry,” Daniel said, with a friendly clap to my shoulder, “Elio’s a debauched European. He can handle his liquor.”

Oliver’s “I know” came just a bit too quickly to have been about the second half of Daniel’s statement.

There was very little to say after that, so we parted ways like raindrops branching across a window; slowly, reluctantly, a jerky, abortive division. No one spoke, but Daniel offered a small, awkward wave, which Oliver acknowledged with a nod and a grimace.

“Well, that was tense,” Anna said brightly, once we were what she evidently considered to be a safe distance away. No distance could be far enough, in my mind, since we were merely walking east and so still on the Oliver side of 114th. It was dangerous to speak of him north of that line.

I shrugged, tried to play it off. Reunions were always awkward; we hadn’t been expecting to see each other; we didn’t know each other all that well.

“I can’t believe you _know_ hot grad student,” was her takeaway, which I supposed was better than prying further into _why_ our reunion had been awkward. “Dude, if you’re friends with him, you should convince him to hang out with us.”

“I wouldn’t say _friends_. He stayed with my family for a few weeks. We didn’t even talk for most of it.” And then we continued to not-talk for the rest of it, but there were at least parts of him I could say with some confidence I knew quite well.

Anna wanted to know everything I knew about Oliver, which was, in her opinion, disappointingly little. We had gone to a bar instead of a club, because Anna said she wasn’t in a mood for dancing, and Daniel had been suspiciously quick to declare that he, too, would rather sit and talk. He seemed to be regretting it now, listening to her hanging on my every carefully-chosen word. I felt bad for him.

 _Is he single?_ That question stabbed at me, prodded at the still-pink wound of Oliver’s departure. No, he wasn’t single, and he hadn’t even had the grace to look ashamed when he’d seen my eyes dart to his hand.

Not ashamed that he was married, or soon to be. If he was happy, I was happy for him. No, ashamed for the way he had lain in my bed, kissed me, and only then told me there was nothing between us. And I knew from his face when Daniel had said my name, in the same way he must have known by that glance, that there _was_ something between us, and it hadn’t faded with time and distance as I’d hoped it would.

“Last I knew, he was engaged.”

Anna hummed thoughtfully, tapping her nails against the side of her glass. She drank wine at bars, like a proper little Cape Cod socialite, but stole drinks of Daniel’s Guinness whenever he pretended not to be looking. “That would make sense. I heard his fiancé left him at the end of last year, but that could be wishful thinking. What do you think, Elio? Did she seem like the kind of woman to run out on a guy like that?”

I didn’t know anything about her save that she existed, I answered honestly. They’d been in an off-again phase of their relationship when Oliver and I met. The penultimate one, as the case may have been, but still too late for me.

“How do you know she left him?” Daniel protested. His indignation was perhaps a bit too on-the-nose for someone who was trying to act like he hadn’t just been dumped in front of a pretty girl, but I let it slide. “Did _he_ seem like the type?”

_He left me._

I said nothing. Anna saved me from whatever flimsy excuse I might cobble up, saying, “well, either way, he’s vulnerable right now. Perfect time to strike.”

Daniel scowled.

“He always seemed kind of emotionally unavailable,” I said, trying my best not to shoot any sort of apologetic glances Daniel’s way when Anna could see. “Can we talk about something else? I feel like I’m networking.”

 _Networking_ was my least favorite part of Juilliard. As a composition major, it was expected of me to find students to perform my pieces, if I couldn’t perform them myself, and to make connections with the visiting soloists, conductors and educators who stopped by my classes on a near-weekly basis. For a shy, recalcitrant Italian, the oh-so-American word _networking_ was infinitely more daunting than the professionalism Charlie complained so vocally about.

Talking with Anna, though, once the subject turned from Oliver, was enjoyable, and much easier than smiling and nodding as Peter grabbed my arm and pointed at whichever famous violinist he had accidentally locked eyes with across the Café – _“is that Heifetz? It can’t be, he’s like eighty, oh my god, Elio, he’s coming toward us, do those hands look like he could play the violin?”_

Anna was forthright and didn’t mind carrying a conversation, and when the topic came back around to my family, was gratifyingly interested in my opinions on my father’s work. “I think that’s such a cool idea,” she said, of our summer houseguests. “My parents have all this money, and they do absolutely nothing with it. At the very least they could nurture young lawyers, or something like that.” I asked if she’d enjoy living with law students every summer and she said she didn’t enjoy living with her parents, so maybe disliking a stranger would be a nice change of pace. “I could show them around; have an excuse to get out of the house. Maybe we’d fall in love.”

She didn’t know how close to the truth she’d hit.

Although _love_ , no matter what my father said, was not what Oliver and I had had. It couldn’t be. Even if that hand in Oliver’s pocket bore no ring, it was too late. He had left me, and what love could survive that kind of heartbreak?

Daniel and I walked Anna to her dorm, because Daniel insisted, and then I walked Daniel to his, because of the three of us he was by far the least able to make it home on his own. Having deposited him on the steps of Hartley and watched while he fumbled in his pockets for his key, I turned to head for the subway, but Daniel’s voice stopped me.

“About Professor Katz – do you…”

He was slumped against the limestone façade, peering at me in the darkness, and I took pity. “I don’t think she’s serious about him.”

Daniel nodded his head, very slowly. “Good. That’s… good.” His eyes never left me, roving across my face as if cataloguing every feature for posterity before he said whatever he was preparing himself to say next. “Before he was engaged – “

“Let’s not have this conversation when you’re drunk,” I said, cold and unforgiving. This was not Peter, sitting with his back to the room because he knew I couldn’t speak with him facing me. This was Daniel, who I hardly knew, drunk and suspicious in the dark with no witnesses. He had seen something in my interaction with Oliver he had no right to see, and I had no obligation to confirm or deny it to him.

“I’m not stupid. I saw his face when I called you hot. And when I said your name like that.”

I saw it too, I thought, but – “It doesn’t mean anything.” It _couldn’t_ mean anything. I refused to let it.

“But it did, once.”

“I barely know him.”

Daniel sagged, if possible, even further into the wall, all the fight leaving him. Suddenly I didn’t know why I’d been afraid of him, a gangly Jewish boy in full view of hundreds of lit windows, any one of which could open at any moment and see whatever he might have planned to do, had he been planning anything.

“Alright, I’ll drop it. But – Peter?”

God, no. Peter and I were like brothers.

Daniel waved a lazy, inebriated hand. “I get it, I get it, delicate American sensibilities.” Then, as he tipped towards the door and I began to think we might end the night without having to say it outright, he said, “I can’t believe you came here to help me get over my breakup and ran into your ex. I can’t believe you’ve had sex with my _professor._ ”

“Technically, he’s a graduate teaching fellow.”

“I write his name at the top of my papers and now I have to look him in the eye while he hands me back tests saying _see me_ on them.”

Several jibes about Daniel’s apparent academic struggles crossed my mind, but I settled for the move ambivalent “I don’t think you’re his type.”

“I look _exactly like you!”_

“That’s kind of anti-Semitic, don’t you think?” I said, a pithy parting shot, turning my back on him again. It was a joke, though not without precedent; people often confused us for cousins. Daniel was broader than me, with the same curly hair, stubborn chin, and sweep of dark lashes over sleepy grey eyes. The difference between us was exemplified in our smiles, I thought. Mine were quick, fleeting, never quite able to shake the tightness of a clenched jaw. His were almost bashful, his lips delicate and pink like a girl’s. He said they made him look _sensitive._ Rebecca called him pretty.

Daniel’s voice was quiet in the dark behind me. “Is it still so hard? Even a year later?”

I didn’t turn back around. This wasn’t a confession I could make to another person; only the dark expanse of South Field before me could offer the anonymity I needed to say it.

It was my fault, us being the way we were. If I had handled it differently – Oliver had tried to be my friend, in December, and I had spurned his hand. Maybe if I’d had time to make a list, a “pros and cons of keeping Oliver in my life” – but in the moment I’d been hurt, and jilted, and I had wanted nothing to do with him. And once we’d stopped, it seemed impossible to start again.

Because we hadn’t really had anything, once sex was removed from the equation. We hadn’t been friends until we’d started fucking, so there was nothing to fall back on once we’d stopped.

We didn’t really break up, I told Daniel. We just… vanished from each other’s lives. And I don’t think we were meant to turn up again.

“Sorry I live next to him, then.”

“You’ll just have to man up and come back around to Juilliard.”

“I’m not sure I should be taking breakup advice from you,” Daniel muttered, but he finally unlocked the door and disappeared into the once-gutted Hartley. I stared out across the empty field for a few moments longer before I, too, headed for home.

I had survived one encounter with Oliver. That meant I could survive another, if I had to.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **I'm reshuffling some things because I realized the way I had split up chapters going forward was really stupid - this was originally the second half of chapter one.**
> 
> Thanks for bearing with me!

Peter, as I had come to expect from him, wanted to know _everything_ about my run-in with Oliver: was he as hot as I remembered him being? Did he look like he thought _I_ was hot? Did I believe Anna, that he’d been left at the altar? Did he look vulnerable? Was I going to do anything about it?

Absolutely not, I said. If all went well, I would never speak to him again.

“That’s not fair,” Peter protested. “Daniel got to meet him, and I don’t? I’m your best friend.”

I wouldn’t have put it past him to engineer a meeting, but unluckily for me, Daniel managed it for him.

True to my suggestion, Daniel had returned to Juilliard, but only to invite Peter and I – and Rebecca, if we wanted to bring her – to a “friendsgiving” celebration in his suite in Hartley. “Let us take your Thanksgiving virginity,” he pleaded, to me.

“Gross.”

But Rebecca said, oh-so-casually, “it could be fun,” so we went.

I hadn’t been sure what to expect; I knew how Thanksgiving worked, but ‘friendsgiving’ was a mystery to me. It turned out, at least in Daniel’s interpretation of it, to involve a lot of wine and pre-packaged turkey heated in the communal microwave.

Daniel’s roommate, Brian, aped at being host in a self-conscious way that spoke of a deep insecurity over adult social mores. Other suitemates drifted in and out, but Rebecca, Peter and I mostly kept to ourselves.

Only at one point did Anna venture over to our corner of the living area. Rebecca had quickly realized that she was Daniel’s guest, not Brian’s, and proceeded to send her dark looks for the entirety of the meal. I didn’t blame Anna for keeping to the less venomous side of the room.

But introductions did, eventually, have to be made, and, in searching for a safe conversational topic, Anna landed once again on “your friend, hot grad student.”

Daniel said “oh my _god_ ” and Peter said “yes, let’s talk about hot grad student” and I fought the desire to bury my head in my hands and disappear.

Rebecca looked between the four of us. “Am I the only one who doesn’t know about hot grad student?”

“He’s not that good-looking, Anna just has a crush,” Daniel said, but the fondness in his voice and his smile at Anna’s “I don’t have a crush, I have _eyes”_ escaped no one’s notice. I was beginning to feel maybe my humiliating encounter with Oliver had been worth it, if Daniel’s eyes were on Anna instead of hang-dog longing after Rebecca.

But then Anna said, “Elio’s seen him naked; he can judge.”

What?

“He’s so tall; you have to tell us – is his dick proportional to the rest of him?”

A half-chewed mouthful of canned green beans suddenly found itself lodged in my throat as I swallowed convulsively, and I choked. Peter rubbed a soothing hand along my shoulders and handed me a glass of wine, but he was grinning. Bastard.

“That’s not how it – it’s not a _direct correlation_ ,” said Daniel, who at 175 centimeters was the shortest of the three men in attendance, but I was too occupied with trying to take a full breath to laugh at him.

“Why would I know what his dick looks like?” I managed, still wheezing. What was I supposed to say? _Yes, it is; I know, because I’ve had it inside me?_ Unthinkable. _More manageable than you’d think, with the proper breath control?_ Funny, but never in a million years could I even hint that I had any knowledge of Oliver’s naked body beyond a vague outline through too-small swim trunks.

Anna thought differently. “You shared a bathroom,” she said, with a dismissive shrug.

“We do have _doors_ in Italy.”

“Guess.”

I was not much of a risk-taker, but I _was_ anxious, and therefore very practiced at calculating conversational hazards very quickly. Too hot a denial, I felt, could seem suspect to someone as tenacious as Anna.

I faked a resigned sigh. “Alright, fine, if I had to guess – bearing in mind I’m extrapolating from what he looks like clothed – “

“We get it, you’re straight. So?”

I knew my face must be bright red, but hopefully Anna would chalk it up to heterosexual discomfort with the idea of another man’s naked body. For once, I could use my embarrassment to my advantage. “So I don’t know, I guess? I haven’t really looked at enough dicks to know what’s proportion-“

Peter started to cough. At first, I worried that he, too, had fallen prey to the green beans, but it soon became apparent that in trying not to laugh he had choked on his own saliva. I did not return the hand-on-shoulders gesture. He didn’t deserve it.

Daniel, who had begun to look increasingly uncomfortable as the conversation progressed, finally called attention to himself by laughing nervously and mumbling something about _growers_ versus _showers_ ; an Americanism I had never heard before, but the meaning was clear.

This was the opening Rebecca had been waiting for, it seemed. She and Daniel had been perfectly cordial all day, but the simmering tension between them and his obvious discomfort must have prompted her to say, with a conspiratorial glance at Anna which fooled no one, “ _men._ Can’t even admit when another man is attractive.”

Daniel, caught between accepting the insult and admitting attraction to other men, opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at me helplessly. I resolutely did not look back. The hot seat had passed to him, and I would do nothing that might risk it swerving back to me.

“I have to go,” Peter gasped, clambering to his feet. “Just gotta – just a sec –“

The door slammed behind him, and I heard him break into laughter.

He was still laughing as we stumbled out the front doors of Hartley and down the steps, twenty minutes later, wine-drunk and giddy. We had been unceremoniously ejected from the suite because Daniel had to leave – he was meeting his parents in the Bronx for a pre-Thanksgiving dinner. There had been an awkward farewell with Rebecca, who was also headed home to the Bronx for the weekend, while everyone else found other places to look.

It was barely three o’clock, and the students whose professors hadn’t canceled class to allow them travel time were straggling out of academic buildings, heading with purpose towards their weekend plans. I wondered if Oliver had already gone home; if he’d taught a class; if he would be alone or if Anna had been wrong and he was celebrating with his fiancée who knew how to host and how to cook a turkey and how Thanksgiving was supposed to work.

Peter was too caught up in his own amusement to notice my mood, rehashing Rebecca’s oblivious jibe at Daniel. Much as I wanted to wallow in the idea of Oliver in domestic American bliss, Peter’s enthusiasm was catching, and I found myself joking back.

We were riffing on the theme of “men can’t appreciate the male aesthetic form” – “ _I_ appreciate the male aesthetic form” – “ _ass_ thetic form” as we walked, shoving each other off the sidewalk into the grass, uncaring of who might hear us. No one but the two of us needed know that underneath it all, there was truth to my joking admission and Peter’s crass punning. There was a thrill to speaking so openly in public, cloaked in the assumption that no one would be so honest if it were true.

Peter shoved and I stumbled, stepping directly into the grass beside the path, churned to mud by the shoeprints of hundreds of students cutting the slight corner in their hurry to class. “Hey, fuck you.”

“Right here?”

“Where else?”

Peter pretended to think it over, pulling me back to his side and slipping his hand into mine, swinging them like a bored child. “Well, you know, the threat of arrest really does turn me on, so.“

“I don’t want to hear about your cop kink.”

“So we can talk about _your_ weird fetish –“

I was so preoccupied with my spluttered denial that it was _one time_ , it’s not a _fetish_ that when Peter shoved me directly into an oncoming pedestrian, it took me a second too long to realize who it was.

I had a brief instant to register the fact that his sweater was cashmere and that his chest was still as broad and inviting as it had been, before I jerked away with a startled “Oliver!” and Peter hot on my heels with a gleeful “hot grad student!”

Oliver looked as stunned as I felt, one hand pressed to his sternum where my shoulder had winded him just moments prior, the other still on my bicep to steady me. He dropped it hastily, brow furrowed in confusion.

“You call me hot grad student?”

Not me. I was perhaps more attracted to Oliver than any one of his female students could comprehend, but I vowed then and there I would never use that moniker, not even in jest, if it meant I would never have to see that bewildered, betrayed look in Oliver’s eyes. Did he think I was mocking him?

My friend did, I explained. Not me.

Was it the one I’d gone to the club with? Yes, that one. I don’t think she’s serious about it; it’s just a joke, really.

Oliver didn’t take offense at being called hot as a joke, as far as he let on. Perhaps coming from someone else it meant less.

“She’s going to _kill_ you,” Peter whispered, but he sounded delighted by the idea.

“ _Me?_ You’re the one who called him –“

“Yes, but _you’re_ the one who told her he had a big –“

“Research project in the works; no time to date,” I finished quickly, darting a glance at Oliver. Did he think I’d spoken as if from experience? That I went around telling people about our relationship after mere months of acquaintance? Had _he_ told anyone? His fiancée, surely. Had that been what ended it?

Oliver’s expression flickered between scandalized and amused for several seconds before landing on polite interest. So. We were ignoring it, then.

“You’re welcome to call me Oliver,” he said, extending a hand to Peter. “Hot grad student is a bit of a mouthful.”

Peter’s mouth twitched again and I kicked him in the ankle, making sure I wiped some of the mud off my Vans and onto his jeans. He ignored me, taking Oliver’s offered hand with a grin and a “confidence makes the man. I’m Peach. Elio’s –“

His _‘roommate’_ was cut off as Oliver’s face went a curious shade of pink and he inhaled on a startled cough. Perhaps I should forbid any discussions of Oliver, I thought, if they all ended with people in coughing fits.

“High school nickname?” Oliver managed.

Thai nickname, Peter explained. His sisters were Cherry and Plum. “My mother says I was conceived in an orchard, but I think they just wanted a theme.”

I kicked him again.

Oliver had no response to that, it seemed. His eyes landed on Peter’s shirt – one of mine, that I’d worn when Oliver visited the villa in December. I saw the light of recognition in his eyes a second before Peter did, as he said “is that –“

“Hideous, isn’t it?” Peter said brightly. What was he _doing?_ “I don’t know why Elio owns it.”

“It’s hideous when you wear it,” I said, reflexive. If Peter kept this up, Oliver would think that he and I were – Oh.

If I was happy with someone else, what did it matter that Oliver was happy in his relationship? It didn’t matter that Peter and I were not actually together; for all Oliver knew we were stupidly in love and wore each other’s shirts and shared cologne and pushed our extra-long twin beds together to sleep.

Peter gently patted my chest – I was wearing my own shirt, but Oliver didn’t need to know that. “I hate to break it to you, but it’s hideous when you wear it too. You can’t keep shirts that are too big for you out of sentiment; our closet isn’t big enough for that.”

 _Our closet._ So that was Peter’s game, after all. I saw Oliver’s eyes widen, at the mention of Billowy or the insinuation that we shared a closet or both; I couldn’t tell. It was cruel, I knew, but I _liked_ the idea that he might be jealous. Let him think I was happy with Peter; let him see what he’d lost.

But then he said, “I think it looks nice on him,” and suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore.

I sagged under Peter’s hand. What was I doing? What had I been thinking? If Peter and I _had_ been together, it would have been a major faux pas to parade that in front of Oliver if he had indeed been jilted not six months prior. Since we weren’t, it was even more pathetic.

Peter, true to his caring, perceptive nature, felt my change and dropped his joking act. “Hey, we should go, I’ve got to catch the train.” He hesitated, glancing at Oliver as if to say, _don’t take this the way it sounds._ “Are you sure you don’t want to come? My parents would be happy to have you.”

I shook my head. Perhaps in a year, when I felt better acclimated to American culture, but right now even the simplest things like popular music left me confused and alienated. I couldn’t sit around a dinner table and say grace and eat mashed potatoes with total strangers, even with Peter by my side.

“Suit yourself, _Americano,_ ” Peter said, in a terrible imitation of Gabriele’s scornful nickname for me. Oliver cracked a smile, to which Peter said, “now I see why they call you hot grad student.”

Oliver’s knowing smile was too much for me to bear, on top of everything else, so I tugged on Peter’s arm and said we should go. I wished Oliver a happy Thanksgiving, which he reciprocated in kind, and then we stood awkwardly in front of each other, each waiting for the other to turn and walk away first.

“Well,” I said, because it seemed wrong to end on such a stilted note. “Later.”

Oliver smiled again, a small smile meant only for me. “ _Alla prossima.”_

 _That_ was beyond my ability to handle, so I used my grip on Peter’s arm to drag him away, tripping over his feet as we headed at a jog for the 116th street station, crowing, “and he speaks Italian! Such a Renaissance man!”

As we reached the edge of hearing range, I spun Peter around to face me. “I can’t believe you did that.”

“Admit it, it was hilarious.”

“It was cruel.”

“Crueler than letting me wear your shirt somewhere you knew we might run into him?” Peter frowned. “Hey, snap out of it. You’re better than him. Listen to your dear old Peach.”

You’re better than him. _I think he was better than me,_ I’d said to my father, on the day of Oliver’s departure. I supposed both could be true, in different senses of the word. I had been cruel, when Oliver had been nothing but affable and willing to start anew. But I was better than waiting on him to want me back, pulling stupid stunts with shirts just to get him to look at me.

I forced a laugh. “See, that’s why I can’t go to your parents’ for Thanksgiving. They’ll call you Peach at the dinner table and I won’t be able to look anyone in the eye.”

Peter said, “so long as you don’t bleed on our nice tablecloth.” Then, looking over my shoulder, “he’s headed this way. I’ll see you Monday, okay?”

And with that, he was gone, disappeared down the steps and into the hissing tunnel.

Oliver stopped beside me. “My apartment’s this way. I thought you might not want to walk with me.”

I didn’t, but it seemed rude to agree, so I simply shrugged.

“You told him about us.”

“He figured it out on his own.”

“He figured out the peach?”

“Well, no. I told him that. But us.”

How, Oliver wanted to know. I didn’t know what to tell him.

There were so many answers to that question, so many little things that in the end had added up to Peter’s _did he like it_. I hadn’t been careful enough; I had been careless in the way I spoke of Oliver; I had looked at him too long once or twice; he had seen my eyes follow the male dancers as we passed them in the Café; I just gave that impression, maybe. I hadn’t had the courage to ask Peter what it was, the one thing that tipped it from a suspicion to a certainty. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have told Oliver.

“He found your shirt.”

“While he was putting on one of yours.”

It was barely a question, barely inflected, just an acknowledgement of how the discovery had come about. And yet there _was_ a question buried within that acknowledgement, a request for me to confirm or deny what Oliver thought he knew, what he thought he had seen in Peter’s hand on my chest and my foot on his ankle.

But to tell the truth would be to admit that I had considered lying. So I took the coward’s route and said nothing.

Oliver closed his eyes and shook his head like he was banishing an unwanted thought – of me and Peter? “Never mind. I don’t think I want to know.” Then, quieter, uncertain: “you kept it.”

This was it; this was my one chance to correct him before it became a question of _why did you let me believe it_. But Oliver was engaged, or was mourning that engagement, and I couldn’t stand there and let him pity me as well. Poor little Elio, still so hung up on you that he has to invent a boyfriend just to be able to speak to you.

The moment passed.

“Of course I did,” I said. I thought I saw Oliver’s face fall, as if he’d been hoping I would correct his misconception.

“I thought you might have burned it.”

I laughed. Peter asked why I hadn’t, I wanted to tell him, but that felt too cruel, if what I had seen in his eyes was not a fanciful trick of my imagination.

Oliver didn’t even know Peter’s name, I realized. I had been thoughtless as well as cruel.

“His name’s Peter.”

“Was he really conceived in an orchard?”

“I don’t know. That was the first I heard of it.”

Silence returned. Just like the old days, I thought, only the buzz of cicadas had been replaced by the hum of traffic. _I can’t stand the silence._

“He seems nice.”

“He is. We’re –“ I couldn’t bring myself to say it. _Roommates? Best friends? Boyfriends?_ I was a coward, and worse, a bad liar. “I should let you go. I’m sure you’ve got family, or –“

Oliver’s face twisted in some indefinable emotion. He looked… ashamed, perhaps. Chagrined. The way I felt when I thought about admitting that Peter was just my roommate and I was still as alone as I had been when Oliver left me. “Just me.”

His hands were right there, I realized, ungloved despite the cold. I let him see me looking.

No ring. Anna was right, then, or perhaps Daniel. Oliver was just as alone as I was.

That changed things. Or it might have, if I hadn’t been so obvious in looking, or so evasive about Peter. I couldn’t now admit that I had let him believe a falsehood. It would seem like I wanted something from him, which I didn’t – or at least, I couldn’t let myself ask for it. Life would be easier if I never put myself in a position to let Oliver hurt me again. Life would be easier if I maintained the lie.

Perhaps that _just me_ admission was a subtle invitation, I realized; an opening for me to suggest we spend it together, since Peter was by now at the train station, heading upstate.

I was not a good improviser, on the piano or in conversation. ‘Vague’ was my only hope.

I said that I had an appointment to keep – there was another Italian student, and we had plans to spend the holiday together in un-American solidarity. I didn’t name Gabriele, for fear that Oliver would follow up on it and discover that Gabriele disliked me as much as he disliked American holidays.

Oliver said to have fun; he’d see me around. “See you,” I echoed.

“What, no later?”

“Later’s your thing. We can’t both say it.”

Oliver smiled at me, and in that moment I would have given anything to take back all my obfuscating and equivocating and say _yes, I’m just as alone as you are, and yes, I would love to spend Thanksgiving with you, but if you’re alone and you still don’t want me then I will try my utmost never to see you again._

“Well then. Later, Elio.”

As I descended the steps into the Columbia Station, Oliver’s eyes burning into my back, the fact that I _was_ alone for the most family-focused of American holidays hit me. Pathetic, I thought, to decline invitations from Daniel and Peter and then bemoan my solitude. I thought of the lie I’d told Oliver, and the possibility that Gabriele, who stood more aloof from our classmates than I did, might be lonely as well.

Well. He couldn’t dislike me more than he already did.

To my surprise, Gabriele said okay when I asked if he wanted to spend the holiday together. No _thank you for asking, I was at loose ends_ or _I’m glad someone understands_ , just a gruff _okay._ We made plans to meet at a restaurant in Little Italy the next day, at what Peter assured me was the traditional mealtime of two in the afternoon.

“I never celebrated it either, growing up,” he’d told me, “but it’s fun. You eat a lot of food and pretend to care about American football.”

Now alone, I finally let myself think of Oliver, though it was the last thing I wanted to do.

I was not entirely convinced that he was indeed single. Maybe he just didn’t wear a ring; maybe he didn’t believe in engagement rings; maybe he’d lost it; maybe he didn’t want me to see it. Maybe her family didn’t approve of him, or maybe he had work to get done over the break and told her to go on without him, self-sacrificing bastard that he was.

With an unpleasant jolt, I realized I _wanted_ him to be engaged. If I could safely keep him contained in the neat box of _the one who got away_ , the heterosexual happy ending he evidently wanted, I could go on feeling that uncomplicated betrayal and righteous anger. If he wasn’t; if he was damaged and hurting and lonely like I was, if he _regretted_ it, things became suddenly messier.

I was busy. Juilliard was, to use an American expression Daniel was fond of, _kicking my ass_. I didn’t have time to wonder _what-ifs_.

I could deal with an Oliver who was engaged, and, eventually, an Oliver who was married. I would get over it. But I didn’t have time to deal with an Oliver who was still a possibility.

It was with a determination not to think of Oliver even for a second that day that I met Gabriele at the corner of Bowery and Grand to embark on our restaurant search. I had worn my own clothes, thinking maybe Peter’s more American fashion wouldn’t endear me to Gabriele, but I felt out of place and foreign even surrounded by Italian-language shops and restaurants.

“Finally, you look warm enough,” Gabriele said to me, when I stopped before him, hands in my pockets. “You will catch cold in those American jackets.”

We found a cheap sit-down place on Mulberry Street that looked suitably authentic, though it did put heavy emphasis on meatballs. The restaurant was emptier than I’d expected; even Italian-Americans, it seemed, couldn’t resist dry turkey and bland mashed potatoes today.

“Your father is American, yes?” Gabriele said. “I thought you might have celebrated this at home.”

We had, a few times when I was young, I remember, back before Mafalda joined our family. After that, she wouldn’t hear of letting my father cook a turkey in the American style.

Gabriele wanted to know about Mafalda, and I told him of her absolute dominance over the kitchen and her decade-long struggle over meal planning with my mother.

“She sounds like my mother,” he said.

“Is your mother a tough-as-nails Neapolitan farmer’s wife?”

“She runs the farm.”

Gabriele’s parents, it turned out, owned a vineyard just outside Naples, with an attached orchard “because my father likes apricots.” I told him about Anchise’s grafting technique and he laughed and said his father used the same tricks. American fruits were flavorless, he complained, and unnaturally large and smooth. It’s the chemicals, I said.

Once Gabriele realized I spoke some Neapolitan, he seemed to soften towards me. My Milano accent was still grating, he claimed, but it was better than everyone else’s.

“It’s like they went to Italy once and based an entire neighborhood off that,” he said, and I agreed. “Like, what is this? Sweet tomato sauce?”

Gabriele and I got along better in Italian, I realized, and, with a twinge of shame, that what I had taken for rudeness was in fact just a discomfort with speaking English.

“I envy you,” Gabriele admitted. “I know it’s because you grew up speaking it, but your English is so much better than mine. It’s easy for you to blend in. I could wear Vans and ugly tracksuits and the second I opened my mouth everyone would still know I’m Italian.”

“I thought you were proud of it,” I said.

“I am. But it’d be nice to be able to just have a conversation, you know? Where I don’t have to search for words and embarrass myself when I say something wrong. Like this, I guess.”

I still felt out of place, I told him. I might have had an advantage because of who my father was, but I had still been raised Italian, and American culture was still weird to me. You couldn’t get decent coffee past six pm, for instance. And no, bodega coffee didn’t count, no matter what Daniel said.

 _Yes,_ Gabriele said. It was bullshit that the only things open late were bars and clubs that we couldn’t even go to – and what a stupid rule, that you had to be twenty-one to drink. He’d been drinking wine since he was seven.

“Your parents own a vineyard. I don’t think your experience is universal.”

Still. It was bullshit.

I had misjudged Gabriele; I’d been so wrapped up in my own feelings of homesickness that I hadn’t stopped to consider he might be even lonelier than I was, cut off from mainstream American culture and too embarrassed to ask for clarification. He reminded me of my mother, in the way he told jokes and his opinionated observations on American culture. We could have been friends earlier, if I’d given him a chance.

I made a decision.

“You should come out with us,” I said. “Peter and I go to bars sometimes.”

“They let you in?”

“I have a friend who knows the ones that will.”

“And you’ve never been caught?”

“Once.” But I told him how I’d talked my way out of it, and showed him my Italian accent when he demanded to hear it – _mi dispiace, signore, I did not know – in Italy it is allowed, it is not illegale there –_

“Very convincing,” Gabriele said, laughing. “A bit pathetic, though.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

It sounded fun, Gabriele admitted, but he didn’t know if he really –

I insisted. Peter was French; he got it, too. Maybe, Gabriele said.

My floor of the dorm was entirely empty when we returned. Even the RA had gone home for the break; someone from another floor was doing the rounds. Gabriele and I took full advantage of this.

Neither Gabriele nor I had picked up the American college habit of illicit drinking – perhaps because we had grown up drinking like adults; perhaps because we had missed out on the formative binge-drinking high school years. But Gabriele’s roommate had, and a quick detour to Gabriele’s floor produced a fifth of vodka and a half-full bottle of Prosecco – “barely even wine,” Gabriele complained.

For the first time since orientation week, we found an empty practice room without trouble – one of the large ones with the brand-new grand Steinways – and set up camp there, sitting side by side on the piano bench and passing bottles back and forth until Gabriele declared my hips too bony to sit next to and slid to the floor beside me. He continued to drink from that vantage point, having claimed the Prosecco despite his earlier derisive remarks.

“You look like Sibelius,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the vodka held precariously between my knees as I absentmindedly outlined a D major chord.

“You look like Liszt.”

Gabriele looked the picture of nonchalance, one arm propped on his bent knee, the other leg splayed carelessly out across the carpet. His shirt collar gaped open and his hair had come loose from its gelled hold, spilling chestnut brown fringe into his hazy eyes. The wine bottle dangled loosely in his fingers. A debauched European, indeed.

“Well then, Signore Sibelius,” he said, lolling his head to one side and peering at me through strands of hair, “play me something, and if I like it enough I’ll steal it and make it my own.”

I tried, but the alcohol made my hands clumsy and I struggled with the fast passages, particularly when Gabriele tried singing along with the right-hand arpeggios. Eventually, he gave in with an exasperated eyeroll and rejoined me on the bench, leaving the now-empty Prosecco bottle at his feet.

He launched into a popular drinking song I’d heard floating out of the bars in Milan, words slurring but fingers steady. I sang along to the half-remembered lyrics as best I could and drank straight from the bottle. When he finished, I chose my own tune, one I’d heard Mafalda humming in the kitchen on winter nights.

There was now nowhere to set the vodka, with both of us crammed onto the bench, so I held it in my right hand and played only with my left, directing Gabriele to fill in for me. He complained he didn’t know the song, to which I retorted it was from _his_ city; and if he didn’t know it he ought to make it up.

We kept on in this vein for who knew how long, drinking straight from the bottle like the bohemian composers we were pretending to be and playing increasingly bawdy songs, accompanying each other or simply belting out _dun-dun-DUNs_ when we couldn’t find the key.

Our revelry was finally ended by the appearance of the lone RA left to patrol the building while everyone else went home and celebrated. I hoped for her sake and for the sake of the residents of her floor that she didn’t always look so grumpy.

“Is there a more _reasonable hour of the night_ you could hold your choir rehearsals?” Her eyes fell to the empty Prosecco bottle, in direct view at Gabriele’s feet. “At least try to pretend you’re not drinking that.”

Gabriele glanced sidelong at me, and for a moment, I thought he was going to run and leave me to fend for myself. But then he turned incredulous eyes on the RA and, in an accent much thicker than the one he’d used in the restaurant, began to stammer out excuses – _mi dispiace_ , I am so sorry, I did not know – I am from Italy, it is not –

With an eyeroll and a “don’t get it on the piano,” the RA left us to it.

Gabriele turned to me, eyes bright with triumph. “That was fantastic.”

“Very convincing,” I agreed. “A bit pathetic, though.”

Gabriele shoved me, then, as I teetered over the edge of the bench, hauled me back towards him. “I haven’t had fun like this since I got here.”

“I thought you felt like you were above all that,” I admitted.

“I know I come off as rude, or unsociable, it’s just – it’s easier to be quiet than try and speak, sometimes. I could wear Vans and stupid American tracksuits and I still don’t think I’d be as confident as you are.”

That stung, and not because Gabriele had insulted my shoes. Hadn’t I done just that, when I’d arrived? Done everything I could to blend in, even if Gabriele and Peter made fun of me for it? I had judged Gabriele for feeling insecure and out of place, when I only felt secure because I’d arrived three months in advance to get the lay of the land.

Gabriele could be a good friend, I thought, if only because he got my jokes. A common instrument and a shared sense of humor was a decent enough basis for a friendship.

As I stumbled into my bed, around three in the morning, I realized that I hadn’t thought of Oliver once.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **THIS IS NOT A NEW CHAPTER**
> 
> I've come to the conclusion that I'm an idiot and the way I had decided to split up chapters was incomprehensible and weird, so I broke chapter 1 into two parts. This chapter here was formerly chapter 2, so if you read both of those, you don't need to read this one and can proceed on to chapter 4!

My determination not to think of Oliver lasted until Monday. Gabriele and I spent most of the weekend together, and my suspicion that he could become a good friend only grew stronger. For those three days, we spoke almost exclusively Italian, and it was easy to forget the person I’d thought he was, when he was so open and charismatic with me. But the return of regular classes brought the return of halting, silent Gabriele, and I didn’t know how to reconcile the two.

I knew Gabriele would never accept help from me. We were friends, and equals, and he was too proud to mingle that with a sort of mentoring relationship. I was the only person who could, or would, speak Italian with him, and I was sure that that was more valuable to him than an English conversation partner.

But I did know one other person who spoke some Italian, and whose position as an educator made him someone Gabriele might accept help from. I just wished I didn’t have to be the one to ask.

I couldn’t seek him out. Could I? Were we at that stage, after only two meetings, in one of which I had lied by omission and in doing so convinced him I had a boyfriend, then ogled his hands to see if _he_ was still taken? Could we manage strictly-business? And what was more, _was_ my request even business? It felt closer to a favor for a friend, and whatever Oliver and I might be, we were not _friends._ Not anymore.

It would be better if we were to bump into each other at random again; then I could pretend that the idea had only occurred to me in the moment, and I could accept his certain refusal as if it didn’t mean anything. Deliberately engineering an accidental meeting was the way to go. How strange, that just days ago I had wished with everything in me to never see him again.

Daniel, once again, provided me the opportunity. He had decided, it became apparent, that one month was a suitably long mourning period for a high school relationship. He and Anna started dating, and, as a consequence, he and Rebecca stopped speaking. Peter refused to “get in the middle of _that_ disaster”, so I became their go-between.

I had hoped I might run into Oliver during one of our meetings, but Daniel, in what I expected was an act of kindness, scheduled them all off campus, and the odds of Oliver being in the same coffeeshop at the same time as us were slim.

There was nothing for it. The Friday before the end of term found me trudging up the shallow steps of Hamilton, past the imposing Alexander and the memories of my awkward first reunion with Oliver, ignoring the single rickety elevator in favor of the interminable flights of stairs Daniel was so fond of bemoaning. I didn’t stop to check the directory; Daniel had given me clear directions, though he had looked at me warily as he had.

I just had a favor to ask, that was all. Nothing salacious.

Oliver’s office was on the back side of the building, small, cramped, with two desks taking up most of the available floorspace. He must share it with a fellow PhD student. I wondered what they were like; if Oliver shared his dry observations with them, as he had with me; if they minded when he rattled his papers in frustration when the right words eluded him. I saw no indication of another presence, but perhaps they were as meticulous as Oliver was messy, preferring minimalism to Oliver’s sprawl of drafts and dog-eared books.

Oliver himself was deep in study, twisting in his seat to look at me like he’d been awoken from a nap.

“Elio.”

I had no answer to that, so I simply stood awkwardly in the doorway, unwilling to enter Oliver’s private space without express invitation.

Oliver, realizing I was not going to speak, gestured me inside. “Is there something I can help you with?”

His gaze was wary – no, cautious. Had he expected an argument? Did he think I had come to finally hash out our failed tryst? Was his opinion of me so low? Or worse, did he believe I was there to throw myself at his feet, now that the rumors of his bachelor status had been inconclusively validated?

I took one step into the room, but no closer, examining the bust of Socrates perched precariously atop the single crowded bookshelf rather than meet that gaze as I said, “I have a favor to ask you.”

He set down his paper – a student essay, liberally underlined with red. “A favor?”

“Your Italian accent is atrocious.”

“Insults seem like a strange tactic to convince me to do what you want.”

“But it’s better than it was when I met you.”

He stilled. “Thanks in large part to you,” he said carefully.

We hadn’t talked about our time together, not really. Our conversation at the subway station had been nominally about us, but with the aim – on Oliver’s part, or so I suspected – of sussing out the nature of my relationship with Peter. And the less said about that, the better, I thought.

“Right.”

Oliver stared placidly at me, as if he didn’t particularly care what the favor was so long as I asked it quickly and got out of his office. Out of his sight. I swallowed.

“I have this friend –“ No, that was the wrong way to begin. “You’re a teacher.”

“Of a sort,” he cut in, smiling, and lifted the paper to my view. “Not a very good one, evidently, if this is what my students are getting out of my lectures.”

“Well, you’re a better teacher than I am.”

“You taught me lots of things,” Oliver said, then abruptly fell into a mortified silence. He looked as though he wanted nothing more than to be able to take a strip of white-out to our conversation, to strike the words he’d just uttered from the record.

I, however, was glad he’d said them. He could have been referring to any number of _things_ from those six weeks, and I wasn’t about to ask him to elaborate, but the fact remained that he had brought it up first. The faux pas was his, not mine.

His silent chagrin gave me the confidence to say, “I have a friend, a Juilliard student, who wants to improve his English. He’s Italian, and I know you’re busy, but I just – I just thought you might be able to help.”

“Any friend of Elio Perlman’s is a friend of mine,” Oliver said grandly; to cover for his earlier slip, I sensed. “I’d be happy to help.”

“You might not say that when you meet him. He can be a bit… taciturn.”

That wasn’t exactly fair – the Gabriele I had come to know over the past three weeks in fact had a lively sense of humor and an inability to take anything seriously. But that was in Italian, and a Gabriele whose pride had been stung by struggling with an unfamiliar language in front of a stranger could be difficult to deal with.

“A prideful, taciturn teenage Italian musician; I don’t know how I’ll manage,” Oliver said wryly. He winced.

Once again, I found myself without words. Oliver’s reply had been almost _flirtatious_ , and with a sickening jolt I realized that if _that_ was what Oliver had seen in me… I was throwing Gabriele right into his path.

But that was ridiculous. I was an experiment to Oliver; he had moved on from me and people like me. And even if he hadn’t, what business was it of mine? Oliver could sleep with whoever he wanted and it had no bearing on me.

“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

I shrugged. “It’s an accurate portrait.” _No harm done._

Oliver was not content to let the subject lie. Fortunately, whatever he had looked about to say was cut off by the heavy wooden door creaking open.

“Hey, Professor Katz, I was wondering if you had a – oh, Elio, hi. Sorry, I didn’t mean to – sorry if I’m interrupting,” said Daniel, my bumbling, oblivious salvation.

“Nothing to interrupt,” Oliver said, with the same brusque finality he had used so many times with me. The door was shut, and it would not be reopened, even though he had opened it in the first place.

Daniel looked from me to Oliver and back again. I could only imagine what he thought. The awkward tension between us seemed so suffocating; surely Daniel could feel it, even if he couldn’t guess its source. Perhaps he thought he’d interrupted something much more intimate and charged than our actual uncomfortable back-and-forth. His _if you’re sure_ sounded too much like _if you say so._

“Perfectly sure. Thanks for your time.” I inclined my head in Oliver’s direction, as if our conversation had been a business one; as if I hadn’t barged into his office and his life and brought up memories neither of us wanted to relive. Oliver might have shut the door on that line of conversation, or Daniel might have, but I could at least act as if I wasn’t rattled. As if he hadn’t shaken me.

“Happy to be of service.”

Daniel’s gaze turned speculative. I steadfastly refused to look at him as I backed through the still-open door.

“Elio, wait, just a second.”

For that second, one single, confused, wishful second, I forgot that Oliver would never call me back like that. That Oliver’s softly-rounded vowels and Daniel’s brash, Queens accent sounded nothing alike. It was only a momentary confusion; I knew Oliver better than that. He was not the type to call someone back like the heroine of a schmaltzy novel. But I stopped in the doorway anyway.

Of course it was Daniel. And as he explained that he had been going to ask me earlier, but finals had really kicked his ass, and then he had been going to ask a few hours ago, but I’d seemed like I was in a hurry, so he’d thought he would just call me, but since I was here now, he might as well just kill two birds with one stone, I saw the proverbial second stretching into an interminable continuation of this tense moment in Oliver’s office, uninvited and unwelcome.

Daniel had a way of speaking as if he was catching you up to speed on everything that had happened between the last time you saw him and the present conversation. Some might call it rambling; I thought he just wanted to ensure everyone had the same amount of information he did. It reminded me of myself. Something in Oliver’s face, when I looked, told me that it reminded him of me as well.

“I was wondering if you wanted to come stay with me for a bit over Christmas. My mom was convinced Anna was going to come, even though I told her we’ve only been dating for a month, so she’s already set up the spare room. The only caveat is that you have to sit there while she shows you my baby pictures so she can get it out of her system before she actually meets Anna.”

Daniel clearly took my silence as a rejection, which it was, though not for the reasons he probably assumed. While my parents had welcomed any and every visiting academic or person of interest into our villa, even kicking me out of my own bedroom in order to accommodate total strangers, holidays were sacred. I had known Daniel only a few months longer than Anna; it was unfathomable to me that a woman I had never met might allow me to intrude on her holidays.

Was this what it was like, to be among other Jews? Did our shared heritage open doors I had thought would not be opened for me so readily, in this country where I knew no one?

Daniel shook his head, rueful, an excuse clear on his lips. I would have explained that I was merely taken aback, not offended, but Oliver beat me to it.

“This is Anna who thinks I’m hot?”

The expression on Daniel’s face more than made up for the fact that Anna wasn’t there to hear Oliver say it. “Oh, man. She’s never going to be able to look you in the face ever again. She’ll have to drop your class next semester.”

I could tell Oliver was teasing, with his lifted eyebrows and his, “that would be a waste. She’s a pleasure to have in class,” but I wasn’t sure if Daniel could. He looked uncertainly between the two of us again. This time it was my turn to take pity. Fair was fair.

“I’ll shoulder the blame if she breaks up with you and makes a pass at him,” I assured Daniel, sliding a glance Oliver’s way. He looked perfectly, mildly amused. Impenetrable. Of course he did.

What did he care if a nineteen year old girl lusted after him from afar? For that matter, what did he care if a nineteen year old boy lusted after him from six feet away? Anna was his student, and now, through my friendship with her, and with Daniel, I might as well have been. There was no point in looking to gauge reactions that Oliver would not let me see, if he even had them.

It was quiet again. Daniel, as the final player, picked up the ball. “Anyway, Professor, the reason I actually came to see you was to ask about your comment on my final paper.”

Oliver’s eyebrows twitched up again, into a lovely, teasing arc, and this time I knew Daniel caught it. “The one that said _SEE ME_ in large, red letters?”

My stomach dropped. I recalled Daniel joking with me outside Hartley, slumped against the wall and making guesses he had no right to make, making jokes he shouldn’t have _wanted_ to make. I thought that perhaps Oliver didn’t care what a nineteen year old girl thought of him, but maybe an eighteen year old boy with whom he had no prior history, who would walk out the door fifteen minutes from now no longer his student – maybe that boy might catch Oliver’s interest.

I should go.

Oliver did look at me, then, quick and startled, involuntary. It had to have been. He would not have shown me so much of himself intentionally.

Of course. We would talk after the break.

We would talk, I agreed. And – “I’d love to, but I’m… actually spending the break with Peter’s family. They insisted, since I didn’t go for Thanksgiving. And besides, I wouldn’t want to deprive Anna of your baby pictures.”

I didn’t stay to see how Oliver might look at me then. The slam of the heavy door silenced Daniel’s laughter, and I was alone.

My loneliness, however, turned out to be short-lived, because only a few days later I was headed to upstate New York for my first real American Christmas.

It was impossible to be alone in the Saechao-Murphy household. Peter had three younger siblings, and his large, open-plan house with its back lawn sloping down into a heavily-wooded ravine invited near-constant games of chase, hide-and-seek, cops and robbers, princesses and dragons, the occasional impromptu street hockey game in front of the two-car garage. It was nothing like my quiet, orderly home in Milan, or the untamed beauty of the villa.

But it felt more like home than anywhere else I had been in the States.

Peter’s family might have been loud, excitable, and prone to speaking in languages I couldn’t understand, but they were kind. I was greeted with enthusiastic hugs from both his mother and father, and effusively-expressed gratitude that Peter’s “not-boyfriend, Elio” had agreed to spend Christmas with them. I shot Peter a panicked look, ready to cover his tasteless joke with an awkward one of my own, but his mother simply asked if that was his _final_ answer.

I knew that television reference. What I didn’t understand was how she could joke so easily about the possibility of her son dating another man. It did put Peter’s subdued reaction to the revelation of my proclivities into perspective, at least.

Peter’s father clapped me on the back with a surprisingly strong hand for a man who looked like he spent as much time buried in books as _my_ father. They’d heard so much about me, he said; they felt like they knew me already.

“ _Dad._ ”

“Let us have our fun, Peach.”

I grinned. Peter kicked me, smearing slushy snow along my pant leg. I bent to brush it off, and a small, dark-haired blur of flailing limbs and sticky fingers barreled into my unsuspecting back. And so it began.

The days leading up to Christmas passed in a blur of food and music. Peter’s sisters were both equally musically-inclined, so nights were spent playing odd arrangements of traditional carols while Peter’s mother, Margaret, and I sparred over who should play the piano. They were American carols, she argued, and I didn’t know them. I went to Juilliard, I pointed out. It was usually a draw.

Peter’s father, Arthit – and now I understood how odd my parents’ summer boarders must have felt, being asked to call someone else’s parents by their first names – wanted to know all about my father’s research and my own interests. The older of the two girls, Olivia, who carried around a large volume of Foucault’s collected works but never opened it in my sight, hung on my every word.

“You have a devotee,” Peter joked. “Two, even. Cécile is tired of my classical bullshit; she’d much rather hear you dicking around on the keyboard.”

“It’s called _composing_ , asshole.”

“Showing off, more like.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Although it was nice to be the target of a girl’s admiration, even if that girl was a thirteen-year-old with ambitions of playing the jazz saxophone. There was no question of me disliking Peter’s sisters, or any of his family. They were all reflections and refractions of Peter himself, and in those first few days I loved nothing in the world more than him. I couldn’t even be fazed by the fact that evidently no one had bothered to check the calendar and realize that Hanukkah had, in fact, already happened, and the Menorah they had bought in preparation for my visit was a kind afterthought but ultimately useless.

It didn’t matter, because for the first time in over six months, I was surrounded by people who understood me. I could have gone with Daniel, true, and caught the last two nights of Hanukkah, could have celebrated properly. But then I would have missed out on sleeping on the air mattress in Peter’s old bedroom, watched by the judgmental eyes of the obscene number of The Pet Shop Boys posters plastering his walls.

“Shut up,” he muttered, as I turned in place, awed by their sheer size and number. “I went through a phase.”

I asked if he was _positive_ he didn’t like men? Fuck you, he replied, and my _is that your final answer_ was choked off by a pillow directly to the throat.

We were roommates all the time, of course, but this was somehow better. At school, we were adults, or at least teenagers pretending to be adults. We sat at our desks and did homework or sat on the floor and drank alcohol. Here, we were like boys again, giddy with our freedom and the kind of limbo created by a sudden vacuum of responsibility.

We took sleds and careened down the ravine into the denser trees at the bottom, skidding into branches which unloaded their snowy coating directly down the backs of our shirts. Do you want to go even faster, Peter said, and I agreed, even though I was sure the flimsy plastic sleds had already reached their maximum torque and might not survive a more turbulent trip.

Going faster, of course, involved greater body mass, which in turn involved Peter and I crammed onto one child-sized sled, Peter awkwardly scrunched behind me, arms wrapped around my middle like a girl riding behind me on my motorcycle. I tried not to think about how quickly he had decided that I would ride in front. It made more sense; I was shorter than him – but it also meant my groin was nowhere near his ass. Comfort with my proclivities only extended so far.

That trip ended with both of us overturned at the bottom of the slope, which I should have seen coming and Peter probably had, soaked to the skin and laughing about it. The sled itself lay somewhere in the bushes, but Peter and I had landed in a tangle of limbs, much too close for propriety. Peter either didn’t notice or didn’t care, gasping laughter into my collarbone.

“This is nice,” I said, unthinkingly. It was an echo of what I had said to Oliver, that day by the berm, but in that moment, Oliver was as far from my mind as he had ever been. All there was was Peter and this joyful, unrestrained affection I held for him.

Peter stilled. “You’re not going to try and kiss me, are you?”

I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t. I had never once looked at Peter like that. I had promised myself I wouldn’t, when I had met him, but in actuality the promise had turned out to be meaningless, because Peter just… wasn’t like that. I had never had a brother, or even a cousin I felt particularly close to. I had thought I felt about Oliver the way one might feel about a brother one also wants to sleep with, but now I knew I had been wrong.

“Not now that you’ve spoiled the surprise,” I grumbled. Peter laughed again. “I just meant… I’ve never had a friend like this before. To do stupid shit with.”

“That’s why I’m not worried, you know. Or, well, I was, but not anymore.”

That was a surprise. That anyone could know, and not feel at least a little bit of apprehension, pressed so close together… I hadn’t imagined that possible. “Because I was deprived of socialization as a child and would probably fuck it up if I tried?”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’re a real terrible kisser,” Peter said, rolling his eyes. “Because we’re brothers, dipshit.”

It was cliché to think that his words warmed me in spite of the snow, but, well. It was true.

That night, in the dark, just as I was about to drift off, Peter said, “you should call him.”

I couldn’t.

He was probably miserable, Peter argued. This time last year he was newly and happily engaged, and now he was alone, probably imagining us fucking. It was a compelling assessment of the situation, but I still couldn’t. Not least because I sincerely doubted that calling Oliver from Peter’s house would make him feel any better.

But Peter had a way of suggesting things so that, even though he never pushed and in fact often never brought it up again, you kept thinking about it until the suggestion began to seem like the only natural course. So, on Christmas day, while the younger Saechao-Murphys were still opening presents, I called my parents.

My father asked why I wasn’t opening presents with them, but Peter and I had exchanged ours already. Besides, it was nearing midnight in Italy, and I didn’t want my parents to wait up for my call.

Was I having fun, my mother asked, and for the first time in all the long-distance calls I had obfuscated my way through over the past months, I could say honestly that I was. I told them about Peter’s family, and Liv’s fascination with me, and Julien’s insistence that I tell him everything there was to know about Hanukkah. And, in a reckless moment of spontaneity, I told them about my conversation with Oliver just before I had left. It was only because I had talked to them about Gabriele before and I wanted to show them that not only was I making friends, but I was working to _help_ those friends.

Their delight at hearing it surprised me. Did that mean Oliver and I had reconnected?

“We talk sometimes, yeah.” A grand total of three times, all incredibly charged and hideously awkward, but three times over three months surely counted as sometimes.

My parents were quiet. Then, with an odd weight to his words, my father said, “I’m proud of you, Elio.”

I couldn’t open that box, not with what I was about to do.

“Look, I have to go, we’re going to eat soon. But I was wondering – do you have his home number?”

They did; of course they did.

Peter’s home was a modern, airy, open-plan house. Accordingly, I could see, from my perch at the kitchen island, Peter catch my eye through the archway separating the kitchen and living room. _My parents,_ I mouthed, then waited for him to twist back around towards the tree before I dialed. I would tell him, after, if it went well. If it went terribly, well… no one had to know.

In spite of everything, even with all that had passed since the first moment Anna had planted the doubt in my mind, I still half-expected Oliver’s mystery-fiancée to answer the phone. But I knew his voice immediately, a confused “hello?” that did awful clenching things to my heart despite my best intentions.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Elio?”

“The very same.”

This is a terrible idea, I thought. I should hang up. But there was a note in Oliver’s voice I couldn’t place, a touch of hope or relief in the way he shaped my name. As if he was glad I had called. As if he had hoped I would.

Damn Peter and his uncanny intuition.

I had let the silence lapse too long. Maybe this was still a bad idea, even if Oliver was happy about it, if we had nothing to say to each other.

Pick a safe topic. What safe topics were there, at this time of year? When the last time we had spoken at Christmastime, he had broken my heart?

“Shouldn’t you be opening presents?”

A valid question, and a safe topic. I grabbed the lifeline he had offered. “They assumed I didn’t celebrate. They got me a menorah instead.”

“Hannukah is over.”

“I know. But it was sweet.”

I had no idea how to speak to him like this, not face to face, where I could watch the minute movements of his lips and the way his eyes went hard or soft depending on his mood. I couldn’t tell what he thought of Peter’s parents’ bumbling, good-natured attempt to respect my identity. Was that the kind of thing the parents of someone’s boyfriend did? I didn’t know. Oliver probably did. Had his fiancée been Jewish?

I was struggling with how to turn the question back on him, when he did it himself. “That sounds much nicer than my Christmas. It’s just Paul and me here watching the tree.”

Two thoughts hit me immediately. I hadn’t expected him to be sitting in front of a tree. That didn’t mesh with my image of him, the Oliver I knew who wore his star of David proudly. Perhaps his fiancée hadn’t been Jewish after all, and he had gotten in the habit of buying and decorating a tree each year. Perhaps now he sat in front of it in a sort of self-indulgent misery, like poking at a sore to see if it still hurts. Or to accustom yourself to the pain.

But that was unimportant in the face of my second thought: _who the hell is Paul._ He couldn’t be a partner. Could he? I would have heard, surely. Anna would have told me, if there was gossip. Or Oliver himself would have brought it up, during my clumsy attempt to claim Peter as my boyfriend without saying it outright.

But Oliver was better than me, and he was too noble to hold another man over my head, like I had done to him. Maybe now that I was calling from Peter’s house, he thought it was alright to mention.

It made me angry. How dare he move on from me, not with a woman, but with another man? Why crush my hopes like that, why make me question the validity of my own experience, just to turn around and do the same thing with someone else? Worse, what if this Paul was all the things I hadn’t been, twenty-six and worldly and independent and as good as Oliver was?

Maybe Oliver heard my silence turn frosty on the other end of the line, or maybe he felt too awkward letting the misconception hang, because he added, “pretty pathetic, celebrating Christmas with your dog, I know.”

“You named your dog Paul?” Had he had a dog when I had known him?

“It’s short for Apollonius.”

Paul, short for Apollonius. How very like him. And how very foolish I had been, to jump to the least likely conclusion.

“Man, Peter’s sister would have such a crush on you,” I said, by way of a clumsy apology. For what, I didn’t know. For being angry with him, when he hadn’t done anything wrong, and even if he had, it wouldn’t have been any of my business. For calling him from Peter’s house and not doing him the same courtesy he had done to me by clarifying things.

Oliver’s laughter over the phone was a balm to my guilt. I shouldn’t have let his approval dictate my state of mind, so long after we had ceased to matter to each other, but it was Christmas. I gave myself a pass.

“Should I be flattered?”

“She’s fourteen, she’ll fall for anyone.” She had fallen for me, at least, if Peter was to be believed.

“Not like a wise eighteen-year-old, surely.”

It struck me that he didn’t know. There were so many things we had never talked about, but it seemed incomprehensible that our birthdays were one of them. “I’m nineteen. My birthday’s in October.” At his silence, I felt compelled to add a useless, “you never asked.”

Oliver mumbled what I thought might be _I was trying not to think about it,_ but I let it slide. My Christmas present to him. Louder, he said, “well, I’m glad you’re enjoying your time with Peter,” in that way people have of winding down a conversation by reminding you of the other people you should be spending your time with instead. And I hated that. I hated that he thought himself not worthy of my time on a day when he was all alone and I had a warm, loving family around me.

And because it was Christmas, and because Oliver owned a dog named Apollonius, I said, “look, about me and Peter –“

“It’s okay.”

It was a reassurance, or it was meant to be one, but all I could hear was the Oliver from the beginning of that summer, with his _okays_ , and it made me angry again, so I didn’t correct him.

“Well I just – I just thought I’d call. In case you were alone.”

Oliver laughed. This time, it hurt. “I am alone. But that’s okay, too.”

The silence between us settled into something final, and I had the thought that if this was how we ended things now, we might never be able to pick them up again. But just as I was trying to decide how to salvage a friendly, light-hearted goodbye from the sudden heaviness of Oliver’s words, there was the click of someone picking up the phone in another room, a string of childish, unintelligible French, and then Peter’s voice.

“Sorry, sorry. I keep telling him that just because Elio speaks some French doesn’t mean his family does, but he doesn’t listen. Happy Hanukkah.”

Oliver’s voice, when he replied, was so warm and amused that it opened a chasm in my chest. How could he be so kind, so genial, to the man he thought to be my lover? I couldn’t have, in his place. I had been irrationally jealous of a dog, only moments earlier. I didn’t deserve this olive branch.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Oh my god, Professor Katz, I’m so sorry, I thought you were Elio’s parents – _assez, va-t’en,_ give me the _phone_ –“

I hadn’t heard Oliver laugh with anyone aside from me since coming to the United States. It was only now, hearing him laugh at Peter, that I realized how strained things still were between us. However he might feel about Peter and me, however _okay_ it might or might not be, Oliver’s laughter with Peter was free and unburdened by history. He sounded happier.

“An easy mistake to make. Is _le petit monsieur_ there a member of the prunus genus as well?”

And he could joke about it, too. Maybe that was it; maybe I was taking things too seriously and if I only relaxed he could relax, too. Maybe I held myself so stiffly that he stiffened in response.

I didn’t know how to be different. Maybe that was why things had gone so terribly; I didn’t know how to be flexible, malleable, someone he could see a future with.

Peter was tripping over himself to apologize, which I would have found funny if I hadn’t been wallowing in self-pity. He deserved it, for bringing up the Peach thing in the first place. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, that was such a bad joke – I mean it’s not a joke, it’s true, but I still shouldn’t have – but I mean it’s cool, I don’t think it’s weird – I mean it is weird, but it’s like _Elio_ weird, so it’s –“

_“Peter.”_

“Right, sorry,” Peter said, sheepishly, once I had forcibly pried his foot from his mouth. “I’ll just – have a good phone call. I’ll be in my room when you’re done, Elio. Or – if you want to be alone for a while, that’s okay too. Bye, Professor.”

And then the line went silent.

Finally, just past the point of it becoming uncomfortable, I offered, “his name’s Julien. They call him Mint.”

“He cares about you.”

So. We were still talking about Peter.

Just then, it crashed down on me how ridiculous it all was, me at Peter’s house and Oliver alone with his dog and a tree for a holiday he didn’t even celebrate, talking as if Oliver wasn’t miserable and I wasn’t guilty. I couldn’t take it anymore.

I couldn’t even say something to end it, but Oliver – always, always Oliver, knowing me better than I knew myself, did. “Have a good Christmas, Elio.”

_Oliver?_

_Yeah?_

_Later._

Was what I wished I could have said.

“You too.”

Peter, true to his word, was not in the living room when I finally pulled myself away from the quiescent phone. Julien was, and I pinched him on the arm as I passed him on my way out the French doors and onto the back patio.

“People’s phone conversations are private, twerp.”

It could easily have turned into a wrestling match or a joking back-and-forth of insults, but I wasn’t in the mood. I stepped out into the snow, heedless of the fact that I wasn’t wearing anything warmer than a sweater. I just wanted to be somewhere quiet and empty, somewhere that matched the unsettled stillness in my mind.

I had thought, or I had hoped, if I had allowed myself to hope, that by calling Oliver I might have brokered some peace, come to some accord. But instead, I had only made things worse. I had gotten the confirmation I had wanted; Oliver was single and I was an asshole. That should be some cold comfort.

As much as I wanted to be alone, I _was_ cold, and it was not comfortable. I couldn’t quite bring myself to walk back through the living room after my sulky exit, so I wandered around the house to where I could see Peter’s window above the gabled roof and threw snowballs at it until he came down – bearing coat, hat, and gloves, because he knew me better than I knew myself sometimes.

“I thought you Italians were obsessed with staying warm.”

“Usually.”

“Too busy being a self-obsessed dramatic idiot right now?”

It was too cold to stand still, so we walked together, heading for the ravine by unspoken agreement. Peter’s family might be accepting of who they thought me to be, but I couldn’t profane the picture-perfect _rightness_ of their Christmas by discussing my own tragic holiday mishaps in view of their home, a Christmas postcard in miniature.

He thinks we’re together, I told Peter. Didn’t he think that already? Well, yes, but probably moreso now.

And I hadn’t told him we weren’t?

I didn’t know why. It was easier, I guess. To let him believe, so that even if he wasn’t off-limits in my mind, I was off-limits in his. To make him be the strong one because I couldn’t be. Or maybe because it was nice to pretend that I had someone who loved me the way I thought he had, to dull the sharp hurt of seeing him so indifferent to me, as he perhaps always had been without my knowing.

“Elio.” Peter’s hand on my arm stopped me, just as the sloping ravine obscured us from view of the house. “Look, don’t punch me, okay?”

Why would I –

And then Peter kissed me.

I wished that I could say I hadn’t kissed back, just for a moment, or that I had only done it because his lips were warm and mine were so cold. Maybe that was why. Or maybe it was some masochistic, self-sabotaging impulse: _let’s ruin this, too._

But it was only a moment, and perhaps it had been so brief Peter hadn’t even noticed, because rather than run screaming for the singular hill, he looked me searchingly in the eye and asked, “how did that feel?”

Honestly? “Very strange. No offense.”

Peter grinned, as if he had known that would be my answer. How could he, when I hadn’t known until I said it? But he had known to bring me gloves, and he had known I needed to be far from the house, so perhaps it wasn’t so far-fetched. “Then don’t stress about it, okay? If I’m your fake boyfriend, so I’m your fake boyfriend. I don't mind, you stop stressing, and no one gets hurt.”

“Why?” I asked. Why would you do something like this for me? Why doesn’t it bother you? Why go to all this trouble, go out of your way, for some petty, stupid revenge?

“Because – okay, I’m going to sound like my dad here.”

I didn’t know where this was going, but Peter’s dad seemed like he would give good advice.

“He does, so shut up and listen. When we first moved back here, that was tough. I mean, it was okay for me, ‘cause I’d moved before, and I had a community, you know, I had ready-made friends just because I played the violin. But it wasn’t so easy for Liv and Cécile, and even though I could see that I was too much of a self-absorbed teenager to do anything about it.”

Peter, self-absorbed? Perish the thought.

He pushed me, gently, no heat behind it.

“I know you wanted to avoid him for four years, if you could – yes, it was obvious, don’t look at me like you’re surprised I knew. But you can’t, and it’s clearly really hard for you to see him. It probably won’t be forever, but it is now. So if being off the market makes you feel safer, it’s no skin off my back to do all the things I’m already doing, if all I’ve got to do is wink at him afterward. And…”

He paused, suddenly unable to look me in the eye. I had no idea what to expect. A confession? A reprimand? I had never seen Peter at such a loss for words. It should have made me nervous, but by that point I would have trusted Peter with my life. He had kissed me just to make me feel better; how could anything hurtful or damning follow that?

“You’re like my brother,” he settled on. “But I’m not like you, and I don’t know what it’s like to be in your situation. And normally I’d know what to do to help you, or what to say, but… guess I’m floundering, a little bit. I seized on the one thing I thought would help, and obviously if you don’t want that then –“

“If you really were my boyfriend, this is where I would kiss you to tell you you’re being an idiot,” I said. Peter laughed and bumped his shoulder against mine as we started up again rather than making a joke out of it, and I knew he had heard the thank-you for what it was.

So Oliver and I had parted on uncertain terms, again. Alright. I didn’t need a heartfelt reunion. I had Peter, and nothing could come between us, not feelings or fiancées or stupid fucking phone calls, and that was better than any fragile reconciliation. Oliver had been like a brother, but Peter _was_ my brother. If anything could get me through the next three and-a-half years of run-ins with Oliver, it would be that.

With that emotional conflict settled, the rest of the break passed uneventfully. Peter’s family took a weekend ski trip to the Adirondacks, so I headed back to Manhattan early. I didn’t mind; I appreciated having the moment of quiet before my hectic school schedule started up again.

The dorms had closed for the holidays, so I spent the remaining few days with Kathleen – now firmly Professor Chamberlain in my mind. Her apartment was comfortingly still after three weeks of constant motion and noise, even if her cat had not grown any fonder of me in my absence. That was alright; I had always been more of a dog person anyway, so our frosty détente was fine with me. I wondered if Paul would like me. Not that I was likely to ever meet him, but if I did.

Professor Chamberlain repeated many of the same exhortations Daniel – and, to a lesser extent, Oliver – had made regarding cross-registering at Columbia, though in her case I suspected my father had put her up to it. It was too late, regardless; even if I had wanted to venture back into Oliver’s territory, which I was hesitant to do after our disastrous phone call, I had already chosen my classes for the spring.

Well, alright, she said, but what about auditing? She was teaching a class on gender roles in ancient Greece and Rome that she thought might interest me. What _had_ my father told her about me?

My equivocation did not stop her from mentioning, too, that Oliver was to be teaching his first-ever solo class, an introduction to Greek philosophy. “I’m sure he’d be thrilled if you stopped in,” she added, as if that was a thing outside parties did all the time at Columbia. She _had_ to have known.

I would probably be too busy, I told her. No need to open that can of worms.

But I had forgotten, so caught up was I in the excitement of the holidays and Peter, about my last in-person conversation with Oliver. I would be returning to Columbia’s campus at least once, whether I liked it or not.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is the real new chapter! If you've read chapters 1 and 2 already, no need to go back and read chapter 3 - I've just split things up to make chapter lengths more consistent going forward. Thanks for your patience; I promise I won't do it again :P

My next phone call to Oliver was strictly business. So businesslike, in fact, that I called the Classics department to leave a message for him, rather than risk speaking to him at his home again. I didn’t know what secondary message that choice sent, but I was too tired of the awkwardness to care.

The reply came through the department’s secretary: one hour on Friday afternoons, right before his class. Three pm. Tag along the first time, to make introductions; stick around after that if I wanted.

If I wanted. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know my answer, either.

But for some fortuitous or nefarious reason, the fates had given me the opportunity to make up my mind about it. Either that, or someone in the registrar’s office had it out for me. Betrayed by the idiosyncrasies of academic scheduling.

I dutifully attended Oliver and Gabriele’s first meeting, ostensibly to make introductions, but once those introductions had been made, I had nothing to do but lean awkwardly against Oliver’ absent office-mate’s desk and observe.

Gabriele was immediately charmed; Oliver had scored points early on by correctly pronouncing his name even though he had introduced himself with a bastardized American pronunciation. It was the most basic show of common courtesy, and I felt guilty once again for failing to realize how alone Gabriele must have felt if the simple action of pronouncing his name right was enough to endear someone to him. I would have taken Oliver aside and thanked him for it if I had known how, or if I had thought it would be well-received.

As it was, I leaned as gracefully as I could and ignored the corner of the desk digging into my pelvis rather than shift position and betray how physically _and_ emotionally uncomfortable I was. The next morning, Peter’s ‘what the hell did you _do_ ’ alerted me to the quarter-sized bruise just to the left of my spine, visible proof of my ridiculous stubborn pride.

It backfired on me in the moment, too, because Oliver caught my wince as I straightened from my deliberately-casual slouch at the end of the hour, and, as one or the other of us always seemed to do when we talked, spoke without thinking.

“Sore?”

I thought I might have flinched, halfway through trying to massage the stiffness out of my lower back, but maybe he read it as a wince.

I should be so lucky.

“Just a kink,” I said. I could have shut my eyes and disappeared, or better yet brained myself with the bust of Socrates almost within my reach; anything to escape this hideously awkward exchange we had walked ourselves into.

Oliver cleared his throat. I couldn’t tell whether he was more mortified by what he’d said or by what _I’d_ said.

“Next time, feel free to steal a chair from one of the classrooms.”

Next time. Dear god. I didn’t know if I could take another hour of feeling like such a useless observer. It was like auditing someone else’s burgeoning friendship.

I expressed my thanks, but made no promises regarding _next time_.

As we made our way out of Oliver’s office and into the stairwell, Gabriele said, “that was weird, right? That’s not some American cultural nuance I’m missing; that was awkward?”

Was I seriously going to repeat my conversation with Daniel outside Hartley? Was I that obvious? I had never thought myself a particularly easy-to-read person, but perhaps I was more of an open book than I knew.

He was a family friend, I hedged; it was just weird to see him in this context.

Miraculously, my hedging worked. Gabriele wanted to know where we’d met, how he knew my family, why he’d come to Italy, what he had thought of his time there. What he had thought about _me_ was ignored in favor of Gabriele’s homesickness. I couldn’t bring myself to feel bad about it.

And that might have been the end of it, if we had made it out of the building without running into anyone else. This was, however, not to be the case.

Professor Chamberlain’s office was on the ground floor of Hamilton, near the front stairwell, which, if I had known it, might have prompted me to chance the wait for the elevator. As it was, Gabriele and I had the serendipitous misfortune to pass by her door just as she turned the corner to enter it.

Obviously, introductions had to be made, and Gabriele stood mutely beside me as I explained our reason for being there and Professor Chamberlain, wisely, did not attempt to dust off her fifteen-year-old Italian. Instead, she assured Gabriele that Oliver was an excellent teacher and just an excellent man, really, overall, just lovely.

“He is very patient,” Gabriele said haltingly, clearly taken aback by the barrage of friendliness from a woman he had never met, “and very kind to take the time to talk with me.”

Professor Chamberlain waved it off. It was no trouble, she was sure; Oliver spoke so warmly of me and my family; he was no doubt thrilled to have a reason to tempt me over to Columbia. He was teaching a class in a few minutes; did we want to stick around?

Gabriele looked at me helplessly, as if to say, she’s your parents’ friend, you deal with her. But I was just as overwhelmed as he was, and the revelation that Oliver ‘spoke warmly’ about me to other people who knew me didn’t help my composure.

I fumbled for an excuse: we really couldn’t stay; Gabriele had a piano lesson to get to – “which I can reach by myself,” Gabriele grumbled, unhelpfully – but next time, maybe.

 _Next time._ Why had I said that? Word of it would probably make it back to Oliver, if he and Professor Chamberlain talked as often as it seemed they did, and that would only make him regret saying it to me in the first place. I didn’t want him to regret being kind to me, even if it never seemed to land quite right. I liked that he was still trying.

With one last reminder that Professor Chamberlain’s Gender in Ancient Greece and Rome class was also at three o’clock, if I wanted to make a day of it, we finally escaped the building, taking a moment to stop by the statue of Alexander and regain our bearings.

“I swear, if one more person stops me to tell me to take a class on authors I read in grade eight, I’ll give up on this whole America thing and go back to Italy,” Gabriele said.

“Careful who you say that in front of,” I said, nodding to the bronze figure looming above us. “A bald eagle might materialize out of the sky and shit on you for blaspheming in front of a Founding Father.”

Gabriele craned his head backwards to look up at the statue whose base he had collapsed against. My gaze caught on the line of his jaw for just a second, before I realized what I had been doing and shook myself out of it. It was just the residual jitters I always felt after seeing Oliver making me look for him in other men’s faces; I wanted only friendship from Gabriele.

“Who, this guy? What did he do?”

“Founded a bank, I think.”

“Very American of him.”

“I almost threw up on a statue of Dante once,” I told him. Why, I didn’t know, but maybe in part because I had spent the past twenty minutes speaking of Oliver as if we barely knew each other, and I wanted to have said at least one thing that was true. Or mostly true.

Gabriele rolled his head forward to look at me again, in a lazy motion I realized must be a habitual one for him, because its arc concluded with his hair perfectly in place. I was reluctantly impressed. “ _That’s_ a story I want to hear. But tell it to me on the subway, in case she senses we’re still here somehow and comes to find us and invite us to dinner, or something.”

“You are an unsociable bastard,” I informed him, to which he only laughed and pushed himself up off the statue.

“Come on, _Americano_. You’ll make me late for my lesson, and I’ll tell Doctor Werner it was your fault.”

If my heart clenched at hearing my teasing nickname for Oliver reflected back to me by someone else, I wasn’t going to let it mean anything. Even if I sort of hoped that offer of _next time_ had been sincere. After all, it wasn’t _later_ , but it was close.

Up until the moment I found myself there, I wasn’t sure if I was going to return to Columbia with Gabriele. I parted ways with him at the entrance, in a last-ditch attempt at plausible deniability, scanning the notice board hanging outside the main office until I found the lecture hall where Professor Chamberlain’s class would be. If Oliver’s _next time_ hadn’t meant what I had come to desperately hope it meant over the past week, I could pretend I had come solely for her class.

The class itself was interesting, as she had promised, and I didn’t feel as out of place as I had feared I might. People audited Columbia classes all the time, it turned out – in a school so large, nobody seemed to mind a few extra students so long as they didn’t cause too much of a fuss. I even ended up writing down the names of several authors Professor Chamberlain mentioned, to look up later or to ask Daniel to check out from the Columbia library for me. It would mean enduring his smug comments about being right that I would get bored of Juilliard’s mandatory liberal arts classes, but I _had_ missed this level of academic rigor.

I was still dithering over whether to seek out Oliver’s class next, packing away my notebook as slowly as I could as the last few stragglers filed out the door, when the man itself walked into the room.

“Elio,” he said, startled, but much more warmly than the last few times we had run into each other unexpectedly at his place of work. “What are you doing here?”

It was perhaps a rude question, but unintentional rudeness was a step up from silence, in my book. At this rate, maybe we would manage a normal conversation by the end of the school year. Wonder of wonders that would be.

“I was sitting in on Professor Chamberlain’s class. What are you doing here?”

“I teach here,” he said wryly.

Right, yes, of course, silly question. Had his meeting with Gabriele gone well? I should have thanked him again for agreeing to help, Gabriele was his new biggest fan.

Yes, it had gone well, and Gabriele had thanked Oliver himself. “You did him a disservice, when you mentioned him to me.”

“How so?”

“He’s not nearly as much of a moody bastard as you are.”

I was so startled by Oliver’s candor that I laughed aloud. Oliver looked shocked, and then maybe… pleased? Relieved, more likely. _Pleased_ was probably wishful thinking on my part.

But it was a relief. When I had heard him laugh so openly with Peter over the phone on Christmas, I had thought maybe we could never laugh with each other again, that there would always be too much tension between us. Just for second, though, I’d forgotten all that, long enough to do something that put _that_ expression on his face, the one I remembered from the last few weeks of our acquaintance in Italy. It was the one he wore when he had said something just because he thought it would make me laugh and was proud of himself when I did.

“Were you planning to stay for mine?” he asked, a note of hesitation creeping into his voice. I couldn’t tell if that meant he wanted me to stay or if he didn’t. Had he always been so hard to read? Probably.

I shrugged, as if I hadn’t made up my mind, which I hadn’t. “If you don’t mind.”

But whether Oliver minded or not, I was not to learn, because at that moment a voice from the back row of seats made us turn. “Elio! Hey! What are you doing here? Are you taking this class? Daniel didn’t tell me you’d cross-registered. You should sit with – oh, Professor Katz, hi, I didn’t – hi.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Oliver’s lips twitching in a quickly-suppressed smile as Anna stopped in her tracks, eyes wide. It was only the fact that I thought I might spontaneously combust if any part of my body touched any part of his ever again that kept me from stomping on his foot the way I would have if he were Peter.

“Yeah, just thought I’d stop in, see what it’s all about,” I said quickly, in an attempt to forestall the _hot grad student_ remark I knew must be on Oliver’s lips. He had never been one to turn down an opportunity to tease, even if he looked chagrined every time he did it with me these days. “Why are you here? This is a 100-level course.”

Anna blushed and mumbled something about catching up on required credits. Oliver’s smile grew.

In a moment of insanity, I reached across the gap between us to pinch him on the forearm. “Don’t you _dare_ ,” I hissed. “I refuse to sit through another meal of her asking me questions about your junk.”

Oliver’s entire body went stiff. I let my hand drop uselessly from his arm, fighting the urge to either flee or vomit. Or both. What had I just done? That was worse than any gaffes he had made with me. I had touched him, on purpose, and even more unadvisedly, I had spoken to him like we were… like we were _friends,_ conspirators, not two people who barely managed to hold conversations without breaking out in mortified hives.

“I forgot some papers in my office,” Oliver said, tightly, giving no indication that he had heard me. But I knew that he had. How could he not have? And his reaction, his stillness and his tight-lipped excuse, told me everything I needed to know about what he thought of it.

Anna blinked, watching Oliver’s stiff-legged gait back up the sloping aisle and out the door. “What did you _say_ to him?”

I could only shake my head.

I had been careless, in my premature excitement over a single unrestrained moment with Oliver. I had let my guard down, let myself think that maybe we could be something like what we once were to each other, and Oliver had decisively showed me I was wrong.

I would have fled the building right that moment if Anna hadn’t been there, gone home to lick my wounds and bemoan my stupid, Oliver-addled brain to Peter. But Anna took my arm in an uncompromising grip and steered me to a seat beside her, and there was nothing I could do. I would just have to sit in my shame for one agonizing hour, and then I could chalk this horrible conversation up to yet another failed exercise in pretending we could be friends and close the book on the whole thing forever.

And yet, the next Friday found me beside Anna again, and the next, avoiding Oliver’s gaze each time it swept over our section of the auditorium but present nonetheless. _This_ was an exercise in masochism, but I couldn’t help myself. I might not be able to look at him, but I had to be near him. It was almost like the burning draw I had felt to him during our summer together, the need for him to _see_ me, to know I was there, wanting him. We wouldn’t speak, but then, we hadn’t spoken much back then either. I was good at pining.

“I can tell someone in the fourth row has strong feelings about that,” Oliver said, midway through that third Friday. My head jerked up in surprise at being addressed – because it had to be me; I had never been good at keeping my feelings off my face when people said ignorant things about subjects I considered myself well-versed in. “Care to share?”

Even so, I looked around me just to make sure there wasn’t some other opinionated armchair classicist nearby. My shyness rebelled at the idea of speaking out against the teacher of a class I wasn’t even paying to take, but when I looked back to Oliver, he raised his eyebrows at me in a clear _take the bait._

“It’s just – I think it’s reductive to call Diogenes a nihilist, not to mention anachronistic,” I said hesitantly. Surely Oliver wasn’t _asking_ me to undermine his authority. But then, I knew Oliver didn’t believe the things he was saying. Was I a teaching tool? I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. “He had plenty of strong societal and philosophical convictions, even if they stood in opposition to the prevailing norms of his time. Dissent is essential to every intellectual movement.”

Oliver smiled. It seemed I had passed whatever test he had set for me, but I couldn’t for the life of me begin to guess what it had been. Had he simply been trying to get me to look at him again? I hadn’t realized my avoidance had been so obvious. I would never understand him. “I agree. So if you could kindly start speaking up when you think I’ve said something stupid, I’m sure we would all benefit from that. Either that, or move back a few rows so I can’t see you making faces.”

There was a ripple of laughter at that, and I felt my face burn. Oliver had embarrassed me on purpose; he _knew_ I hated to be the center of attention, and yet he had called attention to me anyway. I stared furiously at my lap and refused to answer.

“The rest of you could to well to think a little more critically,” Oliver said, sweeping his gaze across the room. The laughter died out. “I shouldn’t have had to rely on an audience plant to correct me; today’s reading clearly lays out Diogenes’ philosophical principles. Who can tell me which contemporary philosophical tradition he most closely aligns with?”

I couldn’t help it; I looked up again, just in time to catch Oliver’s eye before it slid from my face to Anna’s raised hand. “Cynicism?” she guessed, and he was off again, as if he had never broken the rhythm of his lecture to praise me and humiliate me in the same breath. Same story as always in that respect, I supposed.

I tried to keep my expression as neutral as possible, aware of the fact that at any moment, Oliver could be looking at me. It wasn’t difficult; I didn’t hear a word he said for the rest of the lecture. Was my face so distracting? Or had he been joking, for effect? He could be cruel like that in his humor sometimes; I remembered hundreds of stinging little comments that I might have found funny if they hadn’t wounded my pride so thoroughly.

But he had known exactly what I was going to say, right down to my point about intellectual dissent. I hadn’t realized he had paid so much attention to my opinions, when we used to talk about philosophy and classics, nor that he had put so much stock in them. He had known I would give the answer that would highlight his point. How could he still know me so well, after all our months apart, when I had never known him at all?

“Elio, wait,” Oliver called, stopping me as I made to turn into the aisle at the end of the lecture. He still stood by the podium, collecting his things. The rustle of his papers was just a little too loud to read as entirely composed. “Walk me to my office.”

 _Teacher’s pet_ , Anna mouthed. Or she might have said it aloud, but it wouldn’t have made a difference, because I couldn’t hear anything over my suddenly-pounding heart. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what was happening. Oliver had called on _me,_ had solicited _my_ opinion, and now he was inviting _me_ to walk with him. So far in our rocky re-acquaintance, I had always been the one to seek him out. I had no idea how to interact with him on his terms.

Ignored Anna’s questioning eyes and the few curious stares I received from other students as they passed me on their way out of the hall – being called an “audience plant” had thrust me into the spotlight in a way I was not at all comfortable with – waiting for Oliver to finish wiping down the blackboard. It seemed to take an agonizingly long time, but that was probably just my own nerves stretching out the seconds as my thoughts spiraled into increasingly unlikely scenarios.

Finally, Oliver caught up to me, briefcase slung over one shoulder. He halted a few feet further away than was perhaps a normal distance to stand apart from someone, looking as if he wasn’t sure how to suggest we start walking. Ordinarily, I would have been just as petrified, but my skin still crawled with the memory of so many people looking at me, and I was more than ready to head for the safety and anonymity of the cramped hallways in the rest of the building.

Oliver fell into step beside me, our elbows knocking in the narrow aisle. This time, he didn’t freeze. “Thanks for that.”

I shrugged. I still hadn’t forgiven him for calling attention to me.

“I know you hate being the center of attention.”

I stayed silent. Oliver laughed ruefully, almost to himself. So we were back to that kind of laugh. It was my fault, but it still stung.

“I was hoping someone else would speak up, but it seems I overestimated my students’ willingness to interrupt me. I’d have been up a creek without you.”

 _Up a creek_ was not an idiom my father was fond of using, so I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but the overall sentiment was clear enough. Oliver had not deliberately embarrassed me; he had been searching for a lifeline and knew I could provide one. That knowledge shouldn’t have softened my anger, but I never had been able to stay angry with him for long.

“They’re too intimidated by your good looks to contradict you,” I said. I was thinking of Anna, and of the girls who sat in the rows in front of us and doodled hearts in their notes, but as soon as it had left my mouth I realized Oliver had no way of knowing that was where my mind had been. To him, it must have sounded like I was speaking only from my own experience.

“Good thing for me that you’re immune, then.”

I was struck speechless. Where had he gotten _that_ impression? To my mind, I was hideously obvious in my pathetic lusting after him. No matter what convictions I held about not looking at him or not speaking to him, my desires betrayed me at every turn.

But in _his_ mind, I had moved on, I reminded myself. I was dating Peter. I had called him on Christmas to rub in the fact that I didn’t need him anymore. To Oliver, any signs of attraction on my part must have seemed like figments of his imagination, remnants of how I had used to look at him. Wishful thinking, maybe.

What a fucking turn of events.

 _Was_ it wishful thinking? Had he sounded bitter? Resigned? Or was it just a statement of fact, a knowing joke between people who used to sleep together but had moved past it? No matter that we clearly _hadn’t_ moved past it, if his reaction to me touching his arm and whispering in his ear said anything.

Or perhaps I should take him at his word. It was possible that he was being completely honest; that it _was_ a good thing. That he was glad I was over him – so far as he knew – and we could start over again without that baggage. That was the most likely answer.

Two months ago I would have prayed that it was the correct answer. As recently as December, I had hoped we would never be alone like this again. I didn’t know what I hoped anymore, not now that I knew he could make me laugh and I could be his lifeline.

“Lucky for you,” I agreed. I had no idea if it was the right thing to say.

Oliver laughed. _That_ sounded forced. “Anyway, I just wanted to thank you. I knew you’d come through for me.” We had reached his office door, and he hesitated, hand on the doorknob. “Do you want to come in?”

Did I want to come in, after Oliver had just told me he knew I still had his back, even with the awful chasm between us? Did I want to be alone with him in his office, after hours, with no pretext, no Gabriele or Daniel to break the tension? The possibility was terrifying.

I had homework to do, I said, which wasn’t a lie, even if it sounded like one to my ears. But Oliver was immediately understanding; contrite, even, as if it was his fault that my professors had assigned me more homework than usual that week. But maybe some other week.

“Is that a _later?_ ”

Could be.

Oliver’s smile stuck with me for the rest of the week.

I could tell that Peter was worried about me, though he never said it outright. I knew, and he knew, that I was playing a dangerous game, and the only person who would get hurt if it ended badly was me. When I asked him about it, though, he told me that his job was to support me in whatever I decided to do, not to judge me for it, but that if things went badly enough with Oliver that he ended up having to kiss me again, he reserved the right to say _I told you so_.

I really, really didn’t deserve him.

It took three more classroom debates, and three more invitations from Oliver to accompany him back to his office, before I finally gave in. “I know I said I welcomed disagreement, but I can’t let you usurp my authority _every_ week. If you want to call me an idiot, could you do it where no one else can hear you?”

I told Oliver that I frequently called him an idiot where _he_ couldn’t hear me. He only replied that he was glad his idiocy left such an impression. “That’s what every academic likes to hear.”

It felt like a step towards the future I had seen for us, what I had believed we could have before I had gone and ruined it by pinching him. If I could just proceed with more caution than I had been, that future might still be in sight.

Someone – I suspected Anna – had become concerned about the amount of time I spent at Columbia sitting in on classes I wasn’t even getting credit for, when I could be doing my own schoolwork. Or at least I assumed that was the case, because within the span of forty-five minutes I was approached by both Oliver and Professor Chamberlain, inquiring after my welfare.

Oliver asked if I was getting enough sleep, and whether I thought I ought to be spending my Fridays at Juilliard instead. “Because you don’t have to be here, if you have other things to do. Just because I like having you here –“

That sentence was left unfinished, but there was something so unguarded, so vulnerable about it, something I knew Oliver hadn’t intended me to hear, that I hurried to assure him that I was fine, I was sleeping well, I was on top of my classes, I liked being there too.

“Well. I’m glad to hear it,” was his only response. Inscrutable as ever, but I had heard that vulnerability. I knew he was more glad than he let on.

Professor Chamberlain was considerably more direct. I was barred from her class, and given strict instructions to _pace myself_ , which I once again suspected were a direct quote from my mother. In truth, though, I had carved out a space in my schedule to accommodate those Friday-afternoon classes, and so without them I wasn’t sure what to do with myself.

“Come talk to Oliver with me,” Gabriele suggested. “Half the time all he does is ask me about you anyway.”

It struck me that Gabriele had more contact with Oliver than either Daniel or Peter ever had, and yet, while both of them had correctly guessed the nature of our past relationship within days of knowing who he was, Gabriele seemed blissfully unaware. I couldn’t tell if that meant I was getting better at dissembling or if Gabriele just didn’t ever think about things like that, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Peter said nothing when I left for Oliver’s office the following Friday, save a sarcastic, “bye, babe.” I flipped him off.

Whatever he may have thought about me spending more time with Oliver, I knew he still had my back. That alone was enough to propel me through most of the lingering awkwardness which reared its head every now and then, whenever Oliver and I stumbled across some conversational landmine neither of us had realized would be so charged.

We never talked about Peter.

Mostly, I was content to let Gabriele and Oliver talk during their hour, because it was fascinating to watch. Oliver deftly maneuvered around Gabriele’s pride by insisting, whenever Gabriele tried to thank him, that he was helping Oliver maintain _his_ Italian skills, “for when I fail as an academic and have to move back in with Elio’s parents.”

“Absolutely not,” I protested. “Where would I sleep, then?”

Oliver waved a dismissive hand. “You’d be here, playing Carnegie Hall. I’m just waiting until they realize they’re empty-nesters and beg me to come back,” he said, which prompted a conversation about the origin and meaning of _empty-nester_ and successfully distracted both of us from the fact that the _last_ time he had stayed with my family, we had slept in the same bed.

Oliver’s interest in horticulture had also proved an unexpected boon, because, while Gabriele often got in his head about speaking English, wine-grapes and apricots were two of the few things that could take him out of it. There was a brief, awkward moment when Gabriele asked if Oliver knew that Peter had been conceived in an orchard, but on the whole Oliver deftly steered their conversations away from all peach-related topics.

As the weeks went on, I could honestly reassure Peter that I was alright, that this was, in fact good for me. It was almost like therapy. I was desensitizing myself to Oliver, in a safe, controlled environment. Things were getting better.

“Just let me know when you want to stage a messy, public breakup,” he said, ducking away from my halfhearted punch. “You’ll have to give my shirts back, though.”

“But what will I do without unfettered access to your wardrobe?”

Peter shrugged. “That’s the price you pay. I don’t make the rules. Shouldn’t have started dating me if you didn’t like them.”

“I’m _not_ dating you.”

“And your life is the poorer for it.”

I thought that after the ordeal I had gone through with Oliver to reach the uneasy camaraderie we now enjoyed, a public, messy breakup would be a cakewalk. With Peter, it might even be fun.

But for as much as Oliver occupied my thoughts, I did still attend a prestigious university, and that had to occupy at _least_ as much of them. The rhetoric from my professors had shifted from “how to settle in to school” to “how to make connections which will serve you for the next three-and-a-half years.” The connections I was least looking forward to making were, ironically, with my fellow musicians, who I would have to solicit on my own if I wanted people to actually play my compositions.

Peter was supportive but ultimately unhelpful, because he was equally disastrous at approaching people who might help forward his career. Sometimes I feared my hands would never recover from his vice-grip whenever yet another childhood hero of his crossed our paths in the Café. Gabriele simply shrugged and said, “better you than me,” which was even less helpful.

Surprisingly, it was Rebecca who came to my rescue. I hadn’t realized she knew any musicians outside of me and Peter, but that was silly; ballet was just as much about the music as it was about the dance. There was a second-year student who accompanied one of her dance classes, she said, and she thought we would get along.

“He plays ballets,” she added, as if she knew this would tempt me. “And he improvises all the orchestral parts.”

It did tempt me.

So, come Tuesday, I gamely trailed Rebecca to class. I was, to be entirely honest, a little terrified. Dance was completely foreign to me, and after being thoroughly chastised for stepping onto the oddly matte black floor in my street shoes, I thought it prudent to just hang back by the door and watch.

The talented pianist stood in the far corner of the room, flipping through sheet music as the dancers around him chatted and stretched. His profile was familiar – tall, sandy-blonde hair, faintly muscled forearms – and then he turned, and the rest of him came into my view. A strong nose, blue eyes, and stupidly, unfairly long eyelashes, darker and more delicate than they had any right to be.

It was James, one of the sophomore composition majors. I had seen him in our very first comp lab and thought him beautiful, and decided in that moment never to look at him too closely again. Now, I had no choice. Damn Rebecca and her helpful suggestions.

It was one thing to look at him in class and notice the way his fingers flexed around a pencil as he sketched out harmonies, or the way his mouth shaped silent numbers when he tapped polyrhythms against his thigh. It was one thing to admire his hair when it was perfectly styled and still.

It was another to see it fallen around his face while he accompanied the dancers, too busy to sweep it out of his eyes. I was fascinated by the way his face shifted as he played, how his brow would furrow in concentration and then smooth as a difficult passage came to an end. I wondered if I looked as compelling when I played. Oliver must have thought I had. If he saw in me what I now saw in James, I suddenly understood why he had been so adamant I play for him.

The instructor called a break, and the dancers immediately split off into groups. I caught Rebecca’s eye and she jerked her head at James, so I toed off my shoes and made my way around the edge of the room towards the upright piano. I wasn’t entirely certain I wouldn’t be yelled at again if I walked directly across the floor even without them.

James either didn’t hear my footsteps or assumed they belonged to someone else, because he seemed surprised to see me when, at my cleared throat, he looked up and directly into my eyes. His were even bluer up close.

I had no idea what to say; leaving aside his good looks and his uncomfortable resemblance to Oliver, I was terrible at starting conversations on the best of days. I could enter a conversation already in progress well enough, but the opening salvo was always just a bit beyond me.

James raised an eyebrow, as if to say, can I help you?

“I don’t think that’s what Prokofiev intended,” I said.

“Prokofiev never wrote it for the piano.”

He grinned at me. I grinned back. That hadn’t been so hard, had it? Perhaps I should start conversations more often.

“So who’s your girlfriend?” James asked, inclining his head towards the group of dancers, now clustered around a barre with a uniformity entirely beyond me.

“Sorry?”

“You’ve got to be here supporting someone; no one comes to a first-year ballet class just because they like ballet.”

He had a point, although from what I could see, all of these people were very talented.

“My friend, actually. Rebecca, with the ponytail.”

“They all have ponytails.”

“The green scrunchie, then.”

Maybe I should have just let the misconception lie, the way I had with Oliver and Peter. I had already determined I would not even _think_ about how similar James and Oliver looked; having a fake-girlfriend would serve the same function that my fake-boyfriend served with Oliver. But I doubted I was a good enough liar to maintain two parallel fictions with two parallel people. And besides, it was ridiculous. I didn’t have any sort of history with James that would necessitate subterfuge; I could keep my eyes to myself without resorting to lies.

James nodded in understanding. “She’s good. You’re here to watch her, then?”

“Actually, I’m here for you.”

Him? Why?

“I said I was looking for talented pianists and she said I should meet you.”

James grinned again, coming around the piano to stand beside me. He had a perfect smile, too, the bastard. It was like he had been genetically engineered to be everything I didn’t need in my life right then. “Well, flattery will get you everywhere. Did she know you knew me?”

“ _I_ didn’t know I knew you.”

“James. Sophomore comp major, part-time accompanist because all the real collaborative pianists have better things to do,” he said, holding out a hand for me to shake. I took it, even though the last thing I wanted to do was find out how strong his grip was. I got the sense that he was the type of person it would be difficult to refuse.

“Elio.”

His smile was just a little crooked, I realized, pulling to the right just enough to be rakish. “So I’ve heard. You should come hang with me and Rodney instead of that wet blanket of a flautist you spend all your time with in comp lab.”

Rodney was one of the other two sophomore comp majors. I thought he might be the one who looked like he ought to be playing college football, not composing operas, but I couldn’t be sure. I released James’ hand after what I hoped was an appropriate interval but was probably several seconds too long, praying my face wasn’t red. What was wrong with me? James was just a pretty face, just someone who looked a little too much like Oliver and smiled at me in a way Oliver no longer did. That was all.

“Charlie’s not so bad, once he stops whining.”

“Sure, but Rodney and I are _actually_ cool,” James said, which I couldn’t argue with. I had been too shy to approach them in class, and too busy trying not to look at James in general, but they did seem to have more fun than anyone else.

The dancers broke from their orderly formation and pushed the barre back up against the wall, which seemed to be James’ cue to return to the piano. He heaved a dramatic sigh, winked at me, and flicked imaginary coattails out of his way as he sat down. “Duty calls. But hey, stick around. I like a guy who can identify a ballet from a mangled horn part.”

And I couldn’t do anything but obey.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends I got a really annoying surgery a few days ago that knocked me down way more than it had any right to but I am BACK. I agonized over where to end this chapter but you know what, I think it marks a nice one-quarter(ish) through point.
> 
> Any and all knowledge of cobbled-together college Passover celebrations comes from the meals I got invited to in college, one of which, memorably, did include a middle-aged divorced professor who lived nearby. It was as weird as it sounds.

If it were up to me, I might have returned to avoiding James, just to be on the safe side, but now that we had officially met outside of class, James himself seemed to have decided that we were going to be friends whether I liked it or not. And I did like it, despite my best intentions. James was carefree where I was anxious, and he had no qualms about steamrolling over my awkward conversational lapses, which made him easy to talk to. Rodney was indeed cool, but it was James who I gravitated to when we had a free moment in class, James who I sought out when I needed advice.

He could also be cruel, in the way Oliver could be: unintentional but uncaring, incautious when it came to other people’s insecurities.

I was a weird dude, he informed me, during a lull in class, sitting on the corner of my desk and flipping through one of my notebooks. Most people didn’t transcribe music by ear in their spare time; that was some Shostakovich bullshit.

Not Mozart?

Nah, fuck that guy. He had an annoying laugh.

But he had a way of soothing the indignity, too, so that you could never really be mad at him. And I liked his laugh, even when he was laughing at me. I liked how he talked about music, too, even if our compositional styles were as far apart as they could be. I needed to get with the twentieth century, he told me. Broaden my horizons.

My horizons were broad enough, thank you. But I liked hearing him tease me about it nonetheless.

Rebecca was thrilled that James and I had clicked and took all the credit for our meeting, which I let her. Left to my own devices I never would have approached him, so she might as well have introduced us.

Peter was not so sure.

“I just want to make sure you like him for the right reasons,” he said, when I pressed him as to why.

“What do you mean?”

“I just mean – well, he looks a _lot_ like Oliver, doesn’t he?”

“Your faith in me is staggering,” I deadpanned, but I knew he was right. I was being careful. I was not about to make the same mistake twice.

Gabriele was much more decisive in his opinion – and much more vocal.

“He’s too disingenuous,” he said, in Oliver’s office a few days after his first official conversation with James. It had been strained, but I had simply chalked it up to Gabriele’s reluctance to speak to new people. Apparently there was more to it.

“Where did you learn that word?”

“I looked at his face for the first time and it just came to me.”

“Who’s disingenuous?” Oliver said. I tried not to listen for hints of interest in his voice. We were in a good place; no need to ruin it by masochistically searching for feelings he didn’t feel, and even if he did feel them, things neither of us should act on. Especially not when the person who might provoke those feelings in Oliver was the man who most reminded me of him.

“I made a friend and Gabriele doesn’t approve of him,” I said. Gabriele punctuated my answer with a yelp, which was the direct consequence of his mocking repetition of _doesn’t approve of him_ and my shoving him off his chair.

“You treat your current ones so well; I can’t imagine why you’d need more,” Oliver said dryly. I should have shoved him, too, but we hadn’t touched since that first class, and I didn’t want to ruin what we had.

Whatever Oliver might say about my friendships, Gabriele did finally agree to join in on one of our weekly bar nights. Unfortunately, because Gabriele delighted in complicating my life, he decided to inform me of this fact while the two of us were sprawled in Oliver’s office. Oliver, in yet another instalment of the ‘Elio’s friends implicate Elio in activities that Elio should not, strictly, be engaging in, in front of the last person he would like to know these things’ saga, sighed.

“You do know I am still a member of the faculty, right?”

“But not a member of _our_ faculty,” Gabriele said. “You got drunk with Elio in Rome, anyway.”

Oliver’s voice was oddly quiet when he said, “you told him that?”

I thought I understood. Our time together had been special, but Rome had somehow been even more so. It felt more precious than the other nights, more worth keeping close to the chest. I hadn’t even told Peter the full story. If Oliver thought I went around telling just anyone, I could see why he might feel the kind of confused betrayal that causes that punched-out, breathy sound.

I didn’t know how to tell him that no, I had only told Gabriele about Dante and about the San Clementi Syndrome – or at least how to tell him without clueing Gabriele in to what he had so far remained oblivious to – but Gabriele demonstrated the extent of his knowledge for me by waxing mock-poetic about the San Clementi Syndrome. When he talked about it, with his wry, mocking humor, it sounded even more ridiculous than when I told the story.

Oliver winced. “I’ll admit that was a low point.”

“Not as low as when Elio vomited on Dante.”

“I didn’t vomit _on –“_

The expression on Oliver’s face cut me off. It told me everything I needed to know about how precious _he_ held that night. I didn’t know how to reconcile that knowledge with everything else about him, which had up until this point screamed _let’s pretend it never happened._

But then Oliver visibly shook himself and said, “I bet your – Peter doesn’t think very highly of the San Clementi Syndrome.”

The catch in his words struck me like a blow. I didn’t know if he had cut himself off for Gabriele’s benefit or for his own.

I forgot, sometimes, when we were like this, that he thought Peter and I were together. There I was, agonizing over what he felt or didn’t feel about me, and he was doing his best to feel nothing, or being relieved about the fact that he felt nothing, because I was living a petty, pathetic lie. And there was no way I could remedy it without making things worse.

“He said he should dress in drag and con stupid white men into buying him drinks.”

“Sounds like you’ve got your night planned,” Oliver said, enigmatic as always and yet somehow simultaneously very final. For once, not even Gabriele had something to say to that.

Rebecca had some sort of extra rehearsal, and Daniel had a test to study for, so that night was to be just me, Peter, and Gabriele. I thought that might be better, in the long run, given that it was Gabriele’s first time and he had never met either Daniel or Rebecca.

Peter declared us to be “three hot, eligible bachelors out on the town,” to which Gabriele proposed a slightly different way to spend our night.

Let’s play a game, he suggested, since we’re all such hot, eligible bachelors: American women like European men, right? So, whoever can get the most phone numbers by the end of the night, just by being charming and European, wins.

“Wins what?” I asked, while behind me Peter complained that he might _speak_ French, but he didn’t _look_ it, so he was playing at a disadvantage. I, of course, knew Peter to be a conniving bastard who could cheat his way to victory no matter how many handicaps you saddled him with. I also knew that in whining about it he was giving me an out, if I wanted one.

But Gabriele’s game sounded fun, and I had spent too many hours in recent weeks thinking about beautiful men. It would be a nice change of pace to talk to beautiful women instead.

“Bragging rights,” Gabriele answered, which I declared good enough for me and a grudging Peter followed suit.

Peter, as I had known he would, demolished the competition by the strategy of nodding along with Gabriele’s and my conversations in Italian, occasionally inserting a simply-worded opinion of his own, and then turning around with a _oui, je parle aussi l’italien, mademoiselle_ when approached.

“It’s just because he’s so much better-looking than either of us,” I said comfortingly, as we left the bar several hours later. It was an earlier end to the night than usual, but Peter had an early-morning rehearsal on Saturday, and the game had mostly played itself out, anyway. It was harder to sustain an hours-long bar night with only three people, it turned out.

Gabriele sniffed. “Speak for yourself.”

Peter, hurrying to catch up with us after being waylaid by one last admirer, caught the tail end of our exchange. “I could beat both of you in drag, too,” he said, stuffing the slip of paper into his coat pocket.

“ _Why_ did you say we were playing for bragging rights, again?”

“Because I thought I would win,” Gabriele grumbled.

 _This_ was what it was like, I thought, throwing an arm around Peter’s shoulders and punching Gabriele on the bicep, to have friends with no strings attached, no sordid history, no weird, veiled attraction. These were the kind of friendships worth holding onto.

After that night, Gabriele officially became part of our group. He said that he felt a bit odd about celebrating Passover with us, as a Catholic, but Daniel insisted, and since it was Lent anyway Gabriele couldn’t find a reason to say no. His grandmother was rolling in her grave, he said, which was reason enough to go. None of us were particularly devout, anyway, so our celebrations were more of an excuse to get together and eat food than anything else, and Gabriele was a much better cook than any of the rest of us, which I suspected was a large part of why Daniel had been so adamant that he come.

That was the good thing about Gabriele celebrating Passover. The bad thing about Gabriele celebrating Passover, I discovered on Saturday evening, was that he had mentioned it offhandedly to Oliver on Friday afternoon, and, on learning that Oliver would be celebrating alone, had invited him along. This came as an unpleasant shock to me when I stepped into Daniel’s suite on Erev Pesach only to find Oliver already there, seated on one of the standard dorm-issue armchairs and talking animatedly with Daniel while Anna, beside him, did her best to play it cool.

“Why is he here?” I hissed, close to panic. I could see Oliver in his office, or in his classroom, and that was fine. Those were places that I had designated as Oliver-zones in my mind. But this was _my_ territory, and these were _my_ friends, and I hadn’t been given enough warning to prepare myself for that intrusion, emotionally.

“Blame him,” Peter said, nodding to Gabriele, who did not have the grace to look contrite.

Why? I wanted to know. Why did you invite him? Why didn’t you tell me you had? Why didn’t you ask if I’d be okay with it?

Gabriele shrugged. “You would have said no.”

Anna, hearing the commotion, looked up, saw my stricken face, correctly guessed the reason for it, and rolled her eyes. “It’s a holiday, Elio. Try to be chill about it.”

Like she could talk.

It was just _weird._

“It is kind of weird,” Daniel agreed, pulled into the conversation. “No offense, Professor Katz.”

Oliver shook his head, like perhaps he found this as strange as I did. Why had he said yes to Gabriele? Hadn’t he known how uncomfortable it would make me feel? Wasn’t it breaking some sort of rule for him to celebrate Passover with Anna, his student?

“You really can call me Oliver. I’m no one’s professor.”

“They don’t call you hot grad student for nothing,” said Peter, who was supposed to be on my side. Anna, who had only moments ago been telling _me_ to chill, squeaked in embarrassment and quickly went to check on Rebecca and the food.

“I’m not convinced that anyone actually calls me that.”

“He doubts me,” Peter said grandly, to no one. “I am wounded.” Oliver laughed.

 _That_ was too surreal for me to handle, so I took my cue from Anna and made my escape, Gabriele’s protest dogging at my heels: “you spend all that time alone in his office talking, I don’t see why he can’t spend time with the rest of us.”

I didn’t have to look behind me to know that Peter was sending Daniel a _why-didn’t-you-tell-me-about-this_ look, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to know that Oliver had seen it, too, or know what look he might be giving Peter in return. Of course _I_ had told Peter, but apparently this was the sort of thing he expected Daniel to report back as well. That chafed a bit.

Thankfully, Rebecca’s announcement that the food was ready seemed to curtail any conversations that might arise concerning the time I spent alone with Oliver – which wasn’t all that much, anyway. Certainly nothing for Peter to fret over, even if he was a mother hen.

The subject manner remained light for the majority of the meal, save a brief awkward moment wherein Gabriele declared, when the subject of visiting home over the upcoming spring break arose, that he could never date someone his parents disapproved of. Anna stared determinedly at the table, but Rebecca, in a rare moment of solidarity, said, “I think that’s kind of old-fashioned. I don’t need my parents to sign off on whoever I date.”

Peter shrugged. “Call me old-fashioned, then. But then my parents have loved everyone I’ve brought home, so I guess it’s a moot point.” Then, because I suppose he had to get his fun somehow, he turned to Oliver, who was looking searchingly at me. “What about you?”

“I don’t think that’s a question I should answer,” Oliver said. His eyes never left mine.

That moment aside, things went much more smoothly than I had feared. Oliver was a perfect guest, just as I had known he would be. He was clearly more at home at an American dinner table than an Italian one, but he was still just as attentive, just as polite, as he had been during dinner drudgery with my family. He laughed more, here, and my heart clenched every time I heard it directed at someone other than me – particularly when it was directed at Anna, even though I knew I was being ridiculous.

As the meal wound to a close, the subject turned at last to class registration for the upcoming semester – or quarter, in Daniel and Anna’s case. Anna, with a sly glance between me and Oliver, said that I might as well transfer to Columbia, with all the time I spent there. Oliver looked abashed, and I tried not to. Daniel frowned and discreetly elbowed Anna. I wondered how much he had told her; how much she knew. I suppose I couldn’t blame him if he had felt jealous and said the thing he knew would curb her playacted crush on Oliver, but I wished I could know what _she_ knew.

Or I could just skip all my Juilliard classes and get James to tutor me, Rebecca suggested.

“Who’s James?”

The question came in from Daniel’s roommate Brian, who had returned to the suite midway through the meal. He seemed nice enough, from the two times I had met him, but his interruption was an unwelcome one because it gave Gabriele the opportunity to once again voice his dislike.

“A dissembling bastard.”

 _I blame you for his vocabulary,_ I whispered, loudly enough that both Oliver, seated across the table, and Gabriele, seated next to him, could hear me.

He was a fellow composition major, I said. He was a perfectly nice person, and Gabriele didn’t have to be so rude to him, Rebecca said. She was only saying that because she had a crush on him, Peter said.

“If anyone has a crush, it’s Elio.”

There was an awkward silence. Peter and Oliver looked at me with concern, saw each other looking, and, instead of quickly looking away as they had already several times during the meal, settled in to some sort of odd staring contest. _Which of us is going to step up and defend Elio’s virtue? Which of us cares about him more?_

I didn’t need _either_ of them to defend my virtue, and I didn’t want to think about the possibility that Oliver might still care about me as much as Peter did, if he ever had in the first place. I managed a, “not funny,” which successfully diverted their attention back to me, but the odd, charged energy between them didn’t dissipate. I was suddenly very glad that Peter _wasn’t_ my boyfriend, because I didn’t think I could deal with the constant power struggle if jealousy entered the equation alongside protectiveness.

Everyone else, it seemed, had watched it too, because Rebecca rolled her eyes and said, “right, right, sorry. Elio only has eyes for Peter.”

“Give it a rest, Becca,” Daniel finally said, after several moments of strained silence. But the damage had been done. The night’s jovial atmosphere had dissipated, and not long after, Anna announced that she had an early morning the next day and needed to get back to her dorm. Oliver said he would walk with her; his apartment was that way and she shouldn’t walk alone at night. Anna, whose spitfire independence normally would have driven her to insist she was perfectly capable of walking home by herself, saw it for the excuse it was and made no protest as she went to gather her coat.

Oliver’s eyes lingered on me even as he waited by the door for Anna to bid Daniel goodnight, and I didn’t have the strength within me to remain seated. Before I could rise, however, Peter grabbed my wrist.

“I’m just going to say goodbye,” I told him. “He’s my guest; it’s polite.”

“He’s Gabriele’s guest.”

“It’s still polite.”

Peter let me go.

I knew that he had only delayed me out of worry; Rebecca’s teasing had clearly spooked him, as had Oliver’s combative looks. He was conflict-averse at the best of times, and his plan to prevent conflict by posing as my boyfriend had backfired on him tonight. I hadn’t been fair to him, either; I had been deliberately vague about the time I spent with Oliver, and he now had no idea where the three of us stood. But it was fine, really, and I would reassure him of that, _after_ I said goodbye to Oliver.

“I’m sorry for intruding on your night,” Oliver said, when I reached him, hovering in the doorway like he couldn’t get out of there fast enough. “I never meant to make things weird.”

“You didn’t.”

We both knew that wasn’t the truth, and Oliver’s ruefully amused “thank you” could have just as easily been a _thank you for letting me stay_ or a _thank you for lying._

It felt like our interactions before he had invited me back to his office, stilted and full of unspoken truths that both of us felt but neither acknowledged. It had been weird, yes, but it had also been the most natural thing in the world, to sit at a table with him again. The problem wasn’t that Oliver didn’t fit in with my friends; the problem was that he _did._

There was none of that I could say, not in front of so many people. And there was nothing Oliver could say in return, even if he too felt the _rightness_ of eating a meal together after so many meals apart. Anna’s return was a blessing, as was Peter’s tension-breaking “try to keep it in your pants, Anna!”

Anna flipped him off, and Oliver threw a careless “later” over his shoulder as they left. I didn’t mind, for once, that it was for the room in general and not for me alone. I liked that Oliver thought he would see my friends again. He had seen Peter grab my wrist, I knew, and from his vantage point it might even have looked like Peter had grabbed my hand instead, but we could overcome that. Gabriele had made the overture of friendship for me, but Oliver had known what he was doing when he had accepted it. The foundation was there.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said, later that night, as we faced each other across the canyon between our lofted beds. In the darkness, all I could see was him. I liked that. Oliver and I could be friends again, but in moments like these, Peter was my whole world. “I was an asshole.”

“It’s okay.”

Peter laughed, settling on his back and staring up at the stucco ceiling rather than me. “You’re too forgiving. Of him, too. But it’s working out in my favor this time, so I guess I can’t be too mad about it.”

I thought the conversation was over, but just before I could turn my back towards the wall and leave Peter to stare at the ceiling unobserved, he spoke again. “I just don’t know what happens to me.”

Nothing. Nothing could change what Peter and I had, not James, not Gabriele, not Oliver, not anyone or anything that stumbled into my life. Peter was my brother, and, fake boyfriend or not, he always would be.

“You would tell me, though, right? If you and him ever… I just don’t ever want to be the reason you’re unhappy.”

Of course I would tell him, I promised. He would be the first to know.

But, as they always had, things with Oliver had a way of sneaking up on me. I barely had time to think of him, as my workload increased in preparation for finals and juries, the end of the year barreling towards me. I practiced with James and Gabriele – separately, of course – and proofread Rebecca’s final philosophy paper in return for her help with the final movement composition for my mandatory course on kinesthetic musicality, which was a complete waste of time and yet somehow my hardest class. I visited Columbia only once, and spent the whole hour while Oliver taught doing my own work in his office.

Now I _know_ you’re not sleeping enough, Oliver said. I told him to take it up with whichever bastard had designed the first-year composition requirements.

And then, like suddenly emerging from a dark tunnel into an unexpected patch of sun, exams were over and the year had somehow concluded without my notice. I had no plans to return to Italy that summer, either, and Peter and Gabriele had both left for home as soon as their exams were finished, so I had nothing to do but visit Oliver.

It was late May, warm and muggy, and Oliver’s office was stifling in the afternoon heat. I still hadn’t resigned myself to the reality of summer in New York, but Daniel rolled his eyes every time I complained about it, so I had learned to keep my feelings to myself. New Yorkers could be so insufferably proud of their city.

I had won my daily battle with Oliver, which meant that the window was open to let in the meager breeze, and I was basking in both my victory and in the slant of sunlight that crossed his carpet in the afternoons. “You’re worse than a cat,” Oliver informed me.

“Shame that you’re a dog person, then.”

“I like cats, too.”

“But you own a dog.”

“Surely you can’t hold that against me.”

I no longer knew what we were talking about.

“Peter and I are moving in together.”

I didn’t know what drove me to say it, but Oliver was saying _something_ with his veiled metaphors, and I didn’t know how to respond, or whether I _wanted_ to respond, or what he would say if I did. But I did know how to fall back on Peter.

It was not the response Oliver had hoped for. “That’s a big step,” he said, evenly, as though he didn’t care. That was the telltale giveaway that he did.

It seemed like the logical one. We were trying to convince Gabriele to join us, but three-bedroom apartments were hard to find.

If possible, Oliver’s voice in its echo of _three bedroom apartments?_ was even more measured.

In Manhattan? Yeah.

“Did you break up?”

I knew the game was up. I had known it would be even as I started the conversation, even before I had decided I was ready for it to end. But it was time; had _been_ time since the first moment I had lied by omission and let Oliver believe in something that wasn’t there, just because it made my life easier.

I didn’t know how my answer would change my relationship with Oliver. I didn’t even want to speculate, because speculation might tip over into _hope_ , and I didn’t want to hope anything either way for fear that it might be dashed. I didn’t want to want Oliver, but I didn’t want _him_ to think I didn’t want him. There were no magic, perfectly-calibrated words to say, no way to thread this needle or walk this razor’s-edge of a reverse coming-out. Simple was best.

“We were never together.”

But we – he’d thought –

I knew what he’d thought. I had just… never corrected him. Why? It was easier, I guess. I couldn’t explain myself if I tried.

_Elio._

Suddenly the room, despite the breeze, was as stifling as if Oliver had boarded up all the windows and left us in there to bake. He couldn’t have sucked all the oxygen from it faster if he’d said his own name.

Well. That might have done it a bit faster.

It wasn’t seductive, breathy and hushed though it was. It sounded, if anything, a little bewildered. I couldn’t blame him. Why had I lied for seven months straight, only to tell the truth now? What had finally tipped the scales? What did I want from him?

I couldn’t have answered any of those questions, even if he had had the courage to ask them.

“Elio,” he repeated, the beginning of a sentence much firmer and much more resolved than the last, and I suddenly couldn’t let him finish it. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I couldn’t make the decision right there.

“I don’t want this,” I said.

Oliver went still. “What is _this?”_

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

I wished I did. I wished I could look at him and say, I want this, I want you, I _have_ wanted you since the moment I met you and I have never once stopped. I wished that I wasn’t so indecisive, so hesitant, such a worrier that I was forever destined to hobble myself with my own second-guessing.

But I had forgotten that Oliver had known me, once, better than anyone else I had ever met up to that point, and that perhaps he could still know my inner turmoil. Maybe he could still tease out the thing I really wanted from the confused mass of conflicting desires thrumming through my brain too loudly for me to think.

“What would you do, if I kissed you?”

I shook my head. That would only make things worse. Kissing Oliver could never be uncomplicated.

“Then you do know.”

I shook my head again.

“Will you stop speaking to me again if I’m honest with you right now?”

No. Of course not. I couldn’t, not when I’d only just gotten him back. And how hypocritical that would be, for me to ask him not to blame me for lying and then turn around and blame _him_ for what was sure to be a much smaller revelation.

Oliver took a breath. “I don’t want this either.”

It was like a blow. I had spent so long assuming that he _did_ , that he was in agony imagining me moving on with Peter, and now it turned out that he had been as immune to me as I had pretended to be immune to him.

Oliver made a frustrated sound, pushing his sweaty hair back from his forehead with more force than usual. He was angry with himself. “I didn’t mean that. I meant – we’re barely friends. I shouldn’t have assumed anything more.”

What part of that was truthful? It was all contradictory, and Oliver was never so indistinct. Oliver was decisive at every turn. Why not now?

“The truth is that I can’t lose you again, not when I’ve just found you. And I’m afraid if I’m honest, you’ll run.”

He was right; I might. But only because I couldn’t trust him, and I couldn’t trust myself to make the smart choice. I couldn’t _let_ myself trust either of us, because that had not worked out for me, historically. And beyond that, what had he done to earn my trust? Had he proved to me that he was different than he had been when he’d ripped my heart out at Christmas? Did anyone even know he’d broken off his engagement? He hadn’t told me; had he told his family?

They knew he hadn’t gotten married in the spring.

That wasn’t an answer.

“It’s not as easy as you think it is. If it was, I wouldn’t have gotten engaged in the first place.”

It dredged up a long-buried memory of Oliver, leaning against the wall outside the post office, telling me he didn’t know what our night together meant for him going forward, and that he was afraid. Apparently he had figured it out in my absence. And then he had gotten engaged, in a last-ditch effort to run from it, and when it hadn’t worked out he hadn’t been able to admit to me that he had been right, that day by the post office.

“I minded,” I said. “When you asked me.”

“I know.”

“Why did you ask?”

“I wanted you to stop me.”

He had wanted someone to make the decision for him, someone else he could blame for the soon-to-be ruin of his relationship and all the fallout that would bring with it. He had wanted to be able to point to me and say, _that’s where it all went wrong,_ just like I could point to him. An excuse.

“It wasn’t fair.”

 _I don’t ever want to be the reason you’re unhappy_ , Peter had said. _I don’t want to hold you back just because I’m afraid you’ll forget me._

We were too alike, Peter and I.

“I know. And I’m sorry.”

And there was nothing more to say. My secret was out in the open, and his were not. That was the way of things, with me and Oliver. We had finally returned to the status quo.

I saw Oliver again only once after that conversation. I had been helping Daniel move the last of his things out of his dorm, and, adrift on the Columbia campus once again, I figured I might as well stop in. I wanted to end the semester on a better note than we had.

I found him packing. He was going away for the summer quarter, he said – research, with an old Harvard professor. Remote. He would be back in September.

“I think I should go, then,” I said. Now was not the time to have any sort of talk.

Oliver looked like he wanted to hug me goodbye, like he had just before he left the first time, but both of us knew better now. We were not the kind of people who hugged. “Enjoy your summer, then.”

“You too.”

It seemed that was the only way I was capable of ending momentous conversations with Oliver. _You, too._ I had no trite sentiments of my own to offer; I could only echo his niceties in the hopes that it would seem like I, too, hoped he would enjoy his summer. The truth was that I didn’t want him to go; that I thought maybe if we could spend more days like the last few we had spent together, we might be able to make it back to something like what we once had been. We might even be people who hugged.

But Oliver and summers and I were a recipe for disaster, and Oliver knew it too, so he let my weak, useless _you too_ suffice for a farewell. It was only as I slipped back out the propped-open door that he offered one final, “later.”

We would try again in the fall.

With Gabriele in Italy, Peter in Thailand, and Oliver wherever he was, I was more alone than I had been since September. I allowed myself to sit around in self-pity for exactly three days before getting out of the house and remembering that I still had friends in the city. I didn’t want Professor Chamberlain reporting to my parents that I had done nothing but mope around her apartment all summer, again.

Daniel and Rebecca did alright together in larger groups, though I was sure that without me as a friend in common they would have split permanently. Things were a bit more tense, though, paired with their old high school friends, returned to New York for the summer. I, too, was less than enthusiastic about listening to endless reminisces over an American secondary education-experience I hadn’t shared, so for the most part none of us were happy about the situation.

I did enjoy spending time with Rebecca’s friends on their own terms; they thought I was _exotic_ and I toyed with the idea of asking one of them, Bonnie, out on a date, but it was more of an idle thought than anything else, a way to pass the time. Regardless, Bonnie herself quickly put an end to any such idle thoughts by announcing that New England boys were _so_ much better than New York boys, which didn’t endear me to her. I knew several very nice New York boys.

I did take some joy in flirting shamelessly with the girls in both groups whose boyfriends were _also_ present. After one outing in which I found and subsequently monopolized a street piano, dedicating songs to each of Daniel’s taken female friends, Daniel took me aside to tell me that I wasn’t going to get beaten up because I was queer, I was going to get beaten up because I was an _asshole._

But such entertainments could only occupy so much of my time, and more often than not I found myself fighting an elderly cat for ownership of Professor Chamberlain’s balcony. Knowing that Oliver was out of the country, I had taken her up on her offer of access to the Columbia practice rooms, and I spent time wandering the depopulated summer-quarter campus, cataloguing what it looked like without the shadow of Oliver obscuring my view of it.

James, as one of the aforementioned New York boys and the only one aside from Daniel currently _in_ New York, invited me to hang out on several occasions, but I found excuses to put him off whenever I could. He already looked too much like Oliver; spending the summer with him would have been too much to wrap my head around.

Without Oliver just around the corner at every turn, there for me to obsess over and second-guess my obsession, the summer passed in a lazy unfurling of days, and before I knew it, it was nearly September.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Sorry, Peter fans. If it helps, he's sorry too. Supportive chill Peter will return in the next chapter, I promise; he's just gotta feel a few feelings first.)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's me again! Thank you all for asking about my surgery; I feel fine now :)
> 
> Also I promise I'll stop throwing new characters at you very soon; there's only like... two more people you need to meet?

The year started up again as smoothly as if it had never left off. Peter and I had successfully entreated Gabriele to join us in our apartment hunt, and we – mostly me, as the person in the city over the summer to go hunting – snagged a two-bedroom with an “office” only a short subway ride from Juilliard. I offered to take the office-bedroom; I was used to small spaces after so many years of being kicked out of my own room to make way for my father’s guests.

We had cobbled together furnishings from Peter’s parents, a few yard sales in the nicer parts of town, and, briefly, a coffee table that Gabriele found in an alley but Peter quickly vetoed. Gabriele’s parents chipped in to help us purchase a cheap piano, which resulted in a near-immediate ‘no practicing after ten pm’ rule, as Peter and I discovered Gabriele’s habit of running through arpeggios before bed.

Our prize possession was a plush, red loveseat gifted to us by Professor Chamberlain, who was redecorating. Within a week it had been dubbed “schnapps couch,” after I accidentally upended a bottle of schnapps onto the right cushion in an ill-fated attempt at drink-mixing. Our sophomore schedules allowed us significantly less time to go out on the town, so I had begun experimenting with making my own cocktails. The couch was an early casualty, but, we decided, a small price to pay for the ability to drink whatever we wanted in our own home.

At some point, without my noticing, Peter got a girlfriend – Izzy, short for Isabelle, another sophomore in the acting department. Until the moment they were introduced, I hadn’t known that Anna’s full name was Annabelle, but I wasn’t about the question the immediate connection and camaraderie between two women who disliked their full names, even if it mystified me.

Izzy was irreverent and easygoing, and of course I was happy for Peter. She slotted into the apartment well, even if she called Gabriele _Gabe_ just to make him squawk. I couldn’t tell whether his retaliatory lengthening of her name to _Isabella_ meant they were friends or nemeses, but that was how Gabriele operated with most people so it didn’t seem worrying.

So I liked Izzy, and I enjoyed having her around. I just felt a little odd that I had missed it beginning. I wasn’t even sure when they’d had time to _meet_ ; I wouldn’t have thought Izzy’s grueling 9 am to 10 pm schedule on weekdays left her time for much of anything else.

“Well, you spent a lot of last semester pining over blonde boys who are _both_ bad ideas,” Daniel pointed out.

My saving grace in one of those arenas was Clara, the singular new composition major and regional fiddling champion. James had Rodney and his fellow upperclassmen, and I had Charlie and Clara, and it just made sense to split up group work along those lines. Outside of class, though, there was no one to distract me when James and I hung out or helped each other study.

This was compounded by the frosty, careful stalemate that had settled in between Oliver and me, immediately apparent upon his return. Our schedules no longer lined up, and we hadn’t quite made it over the hurdle that would have allowed us to spend time together without that pretext. I didn’t know how to close the gap again.

I knew that Gabriele and Oliver were still in frequent contact, but I didn’t know how to request Gabriele’s advice or solicit his help in getting back into Oliver’s good graces without admitting _why_ I had seemingly fallen out of them again. Instead, I pretended I was only mildly interested in what or how Oliver was doing, in the hopes that Gabriele would choose me to be his nightly sounding board.

But it wasn’t Gabriele, after all, who bridged that divide. It was Oliver.

I had learned from Gabriele that Oliver was teaching another 100-level course, and that his students this time around were considerably less engaged than the class I had sat in on. “He thinks it’s because he doesn’t have you,” Gabriele said, and, incomprehensibly, winked at me.

“Doesn’t what?”

“Doesn’t have you there to argue with him.”

Of course that was what Oliver had meant, but I wasn’t convinced it was what _Gabriele_ had meant. But since we had never had an awkward conversation of the kind I had had with Peter and Daniel, I chalked it up to a quirk he’d picked up sometime in his English learning and thought no more about it.

I wasn’t shocked, then, by the call I received from Oliver a few weeks into the term. He missed having an audience plant, he said. I wouldn’t always be around to be his crutch, I reminded him.

“Hopefully by then I’ll be teaching courses that are interesting on their own merits, and not only because you make them interesting.”

I didn’t know how to take that. _Audience plant_ was Oliver’s and my joke; neither of us had shared it with other people, as far as I knew. By saying _audience plant_ , Oliver was saying _I missed you._ Or I hoped he was.

I was ashamed of my behavior during our last few meetings in May. No matter how many times I replayed them, I couldn’t find a reason for why I had acted the way I had, and why I had _re_ acted the way I had when Oliver finally called me on it. The best answer that I could come up with was that I had panicked. I had still felt hurt, and everything had happened too quickly for me to decide whether that hurt had subsided enough to put it aside in favor of starting something new with Oliver.

I couldn’t explain _his_ behavior, either, and I tried not to think too hard about that.

But Oliver’s phone call was not to beg me back into his life, as I might have hoped it would be; it was merely to ask if I might come to one of his classes to assist him with a demonstration.

What kind of demonstration? A Socratic dialogue, nothing complicated. He would have asked one of his fellow doctoral candidates, but they were all busy and probably didn’t speak Greek as well as I did.

How did Oliver know I spoke Greek? I had always been able to read a little, a gift from my father who had tried to interest me in it at a young age, but it hadn’t been until I had read Oliver’s book on Heraclitus that I had put any real effort into the language. Had my parents told him I had picked it up again? What had he thought? Had I come across as a pathetic child, longing to impress him, even if he would never know I had done it?

Or had it seemed like a tribute, a way to remember him even after he had abandoned me or I had shut him out of my life? If he had seen it like that, what must he have felt on meeting me again, only to think I had moved on from him so quickly, after all that effort?

I was so spooked by the revelation that Oliver knew about my secret studying that I initially declined. But Peter informed me that if I didn’t go, he would tell his sister Olivia and she would never forgive me, “and then you can’t come to Christmas with us this year.” A powerful incentive.

It also struck me that Peter was meddling. I wondered what had changed his mind about his insecurities over the summer. I hadn’t told him about Oliver asking what I would do if he kissed me, and the uneasiness of keeping a secret from Peter gnawed at me the longer I went on keeping it. It struck me how far we had come from this time one year ago, when I had contemplated lying to him for seven months straight about Oliver. And then I had lied to Oliver instead.

So it was guilt and a fear of disappointing Peter, rather than Liv, that finally convinced me to say yes. The relief in Oliver’s voice over the phone when I called to give my answer was, I thought, a bit overmuch for someone who only wanted a teaching assistant. But it was probably wishful thinking.

Should we practice? I asked, and Oliver only said, do you need to? Privately, I felt that I probably did, but I wanted Oliver to think that I was as proficient in ancient Greek as he thought me to be, so I brushed up on vocabulary and syntax on my own and ignored James’ reminders that I was a _music_ student, come on, Elio, forget him and come work with me.

When I arrived at Oliver’s classroom on the Wednesday we had agreed to meet, a much smaller but slightly less dingy room on the third floor, I was surprised to find Anna and Daniel waiting by the door for me.

“We wanted to come cheer you on,” Anna said.

“You didn’t tell me you knew Greek,” Daniel accused.

I shrugged helplessly rather than explain that I didn’t, not to the extent Oliver had made it sound I did, but that I would learn Mandarin if I thought it would make him look at me fondly again.

Thankfully, Oliver himself appeared at that moment to usher us into the room, with an arch, “back again?” for Anna and a wink for Daniel. His hand hovered just over my shoulder blades, pushing me towards the front of the classroom yet never quite touching. A fitting metaphor, I thought. Anna gave me a thumbs up as I passed.

Oliver and I didn’t speak as the rest of the class filed in. I thought it was probably because he had papers to sort and a demonstration to prepare for, but it still left me with nothing to do but stand there and make awkward eye contact with Oliver’s students. I wondered if he had told them in advance I would be there, and if he had, what he had told them about me.

Very little, it turned out.

“This is Elio Perlman,” Oliver said as the class settled into silence, with a degree of smugness I didn’t appreciate. He _knew_ I hated not only the spotlight but, more importantly, being defined by who my father was. He hadn’t told me I would come to his classroom to do him a favor only to be _teased._ “If you read your syllabus, which I’m sure at least four of you did, you know we’ll be reading several articles by his father.”

“Hey,” said a boy in the back row, “I know that guy. He’s the kid who used to argue with you last semester.”

A few seats to his left, beside the door, Anna looked delighted. Daniel mouthed, _tough luck._

I felt myself go red with the embarrassment of being stared at and recognized. I had only argued because Oliver had asked me too, obliquely, and because I had been desperate to speak to him, in any way he would allow.

Oliver smirked at me. I was completely out of my depth. We had parted on bad terms, I had thought, or at the very least strained terms. And now here he was, as if none of it had ever happened, as if we were closer than we had been even before I had gone and soured everything with my confession about Peter. What sort of conclusions had _he_ come to over the summer?

He turned to the class. “Any questions before we start?”

A pretty, petite girl in the very front center raised her hand. “Is he single?”

I was so startled that I did what must have looked like a comedic double-take to Oliver – Oliver, whose teasing, conspiratorial air had completely vanished. It was the same way he had looked whenever anyone reminded him that Peter and I were together, as if he been so lured in by the seductive familiarity of being friends with me that for a moment he had forgotten other people might have a greater claim to my time.

 _That_ was why I didn’t understand why he had pulled back, why he hadn’t seen through my dithering and just kissed me, back in May.

I looked the girl again, as subtly as I could. I felt like I knew everything about her just by looking at her – hair cut in the asymmetrical bob all the black business students seemed to favor; a neon yellow jacket that looked much better on her than it did on pale, freckled Rebecca; seated front and center with her color-coded highlighters. Smart, driven, audacious. And gutsy, to ask out a stranger during an in-class demonstration.

She saw me looking, if the unimpressed raise of her eyebrows was any indication. Well then, I thought. If she was sitting in such a prime spot to ask questions, she already knew how this lesson was going to go. And, well, Oliver had teased _me._

“I have to admit I’m not very up on American flirting,” I said, smiling at her and ignoring Oliver completely. “You’re asking if I’m single because you think I’m cute?”

She grinned back. “Got it in one.”

“And if I am single, your next question would be to ask me out?”

Oliver cleared his throat. To me, who knew him better than anyone else in the room, it sounded a little desperate. “I think this a conversation better saved for _after class_ , but thank you Elio, Miss Thomas; that was an excellent demonstration of what we’ll be doing today.” He rallied a smile, which I thought was more for my benefit than hers. “And hopefully proof to the rest of you that classical philosophy can be fun, when it isn’t being taught by a decrepit old buzzkill like me.”

Some of the students – freshmen, I suspected – shifted in their seats, probably startled at hearing a professor call himself a _buzzkill._ From the back of the room, Daniel and Anna fixed me with identical expressions of shocked confusion. How had this class gone off the rails so quickly? Oliver and I could no longer be trusted around each other as friends, it seemed; the charged energy between us had spilled over into farce.

But the class as a whole was magnitudes more engaged than they had been when I walked in. Perhaps this had been Oliver’s plan all along, like when he had strategically humiliated me by asking about Diogenes. It seemed unlikely that this girl in the front row – Miss Thomas, such an oddly formal term of address to hear out of the mouth of the man who had called my father _Pro_ – was also an audience plant, but not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

I would play into his hands again, then, if that was what he wanted. If it wasn’t, at least I could embarrass him a little, in repayment for how he had embarrassed _me._ I pretended to smother a cough in my elbow, loudly and performatively enough that the students in the first few rows could hear my muttered _hot professor._ Several girls laughed. Anna looked ready to bolt out of her seat and drag me out into the hallway to demand an explanation.

“You’re ruining my cred,” Oliver stage-whispered to me. This _must_ be a stunt; Oliver was not the kind of person who said words like _buzzkill_ or _cred._ “I’m a serious scholar.”

The words might have been meant for everyone else, but the look on his face, an odd blend of _thank you_ and _that’s enough_ , was only for me.

Finally, after that baffling and disconcerting prologue, we transitioned into a very mundane dialogue about the New York City subway, of all things. I settled into the familiarity of it with relief; it had been one of my father’s favorite games to play with me when I was young, so the rhythms of ignorance-leading question-response were almost soothing. I thought I had performed admirably well, until Oliver said, “now, we’ll do it in Greek,” with a lift of his eyebrows as if to say _did you think I wouldn’t make you do it?_

I had been too hasty in my wishing for him back in my life; I despised him and never wanted to speak to him again.

Our conversation in Greek went less smoothly, but with any luck, I thought, no one in the audience could understand us well enough to know how badly I struggled. Oliver looked like he was holding back laughter, and my glare did nothing to stop it.

The rest of the lesson felt interminable, and if I had had my liberty I would have fled the room the minute my obligation to stay was through, but I knew Oliver would want to speak to me, after, and _I_ wanted to ask him what on earth he had been trying to pull. But when I approached him at the end of the hour, wiping down the blackboard in a faint echo of our first post-class conversation in the spring, all I had been planning to say went out the window.

He wanted to thank me, he said, not turning around. The muscles of his back had suddenly gone tense beneath his dress shirt.

He had better; what was _that?_

Oliver laughed. Not for that, although I had been a very good sport.

What for, then?

For letting him come to Passover. He had never gotten the chance to thank me properly. It had been hard for me, he knew, and it had meant a lot to him; the holidays had been pretty miserable without – friends.

The pause before _friends_ was so significant that it couldn’t have been intentional.

I could do nothing but gape at his back, completely lost for words. Had this whole stunt been a pretext to thank me for not kicking him out of a dinner party he had crashed? I would never understand this man.

Before I could scrape together something to say, someone tapped me on the shoulder, and Oliver made his escape. I turned to find the girl from the front row, grinning up at me. She was even tinier up close.

“So, how about it?”

I ignored her question for the time being. “Did he put you up to this?”

“In a way. He told me you’d take the bait if I startled you enough; I came up with the prompt on my own.” She stuck out her hand for me to shake. “Laurie Thomas, professional teacher’s pet.”

“Elio Perlman.”

She knew. She had read several of my father’s books.

Why the hell not?

After exchanging numbers and bidding goodbye to Laurie, I stumbled out of the classroom into Daniel and Anna’s expectant arms, shell-shocked.

“What was _that?_ ” Anna breathed, eyes wide. I had no answer for her.

“Dude, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say he bribed a girl into asking you out so he could flirt with you vicariously,” Daniel said. “Did you say yes?”

I had.

“He’ll hate _that._ ”

Truth be told, I had been so caught up in the whirlwind of embarrassment and confusion that had been my experience of that class that saying yes to Laurie had seemed only the natural conclusion to one of the strangest hours of my life, but if any summation of what had transpired between me, Oliver and Laurie rang true, it was that.

Oliver’s other words to me, the ones he had spoken for me alone, so honest that he couldn’t say them facing me, stuck with me for the next week. We hadn’t talked since the demonstration, and I wondered how Oliver felt, knowing that he had thrown Laurie directly into my path.

Peter, Gabriele and I had been selected to host Rosh Hashana that year, ostensibly because I was “good at hosting” after so many dinners with my parents and their nightly guests, but more likely, I thought, because Brian was tired of cleaning up after his roommate’s friends.

I had to admit that it was the obvious choice – our apartment, with its easy access by subway to both Juilliard and Columbia, had become the unofficial hangout spot. It wasn’t unusual to find everyone there on a weekend afternoon; Daniel and Anna studying, Gabriele and I improvising piano duets, Peter running lines with Izzy, Rebecca doing homework in physical configurations I couldn’t have achieved if you had broken most of my bones. She and Daniel had finally patched things up, out of necessity more than any desire to be friends again, but the easing of tensions between them was a welcome relief to the rest of us.

It felt like home in a way nothing else had, not even Christmas with Peter – or, more accurately, like summers at the Villa, living out of each other’s pockets and reveling in the quiet joy of just sharing space with other people. The only thing missing was Oliver.

So it was this scene that Oliver walked into, the Sunday before Rosh Hashanah, to retrieve a book he had lent to Gabriele, and Gabriele, in characteristic forgetfulness, had yet to return. It still stung, to know that he and Gabriele had grown so close, while he and I were still engaged in our exhausting, on-again off-again attempt at friendship.

But Oliver’s thanks for inviting him to Passover – or rather, for Gabriele’s invitation, which stung in a different way – still tugged at me, so when Oliver said, “cozy,” I felt compelled to offer.

“We’re doing a Rosh Hashanah thing next week. If you wanted to come.”

I knew before he began to speak that he would accept, but at that moment, Gabriele emerged from his room with Oliver’s copy of _Se L’amore_ in hand. Oliver must have seen the hurt and betrayal on my face, because he rerouted smoothly, as if he had never felt the gratitude I had seen in _him._ “You’ve got a week,” he said gently. “I won’t be offended if you rescind the invitation.”

This time, the conspicuous silence was on my end. I didn’t know if I wanted Oliver to come to my apartment, sit in my space, knowing that he had shared _Se L’amore_ with Gabriele, something that I held so close to me, the most tangible, solid reminder of Oliver. I didn’t know if I could sit at a table with the two of them and not feel jealous.

I suddenly understood how Oliver must have felt watching Peter and me at Passover.

Since it seemed Oliver and I were destined to trade off extending overtures for the rest of our lives, he called me the morning of to ask where we stood. To be honest, I still didn’t know, but the hesitant, hopeful note in his voice on “if I’m coming, I need to know so I can buy something to bring, so… am I coming?” decided it for me.

There was no way I ever would have refused him, not really. But I had to know, before I allowed him into my home, what, exactly, I was allowing in, what sort of baggage he was bringing alongside wine I asked him to buy, since it was easier if he bought it.

“Why did you give Gabriele that book?”

Because he had kept making fun of it, and Oliver had been fed up with listening to him. Gabriele could be difficult to shut up, at times.

Had he liked it? He thought it was fine, Oliver said. For some reason, that warmed me.

Oliver would bring wine.

I spent the rest of the day in a panic. It was one thing to eat a meal with Oliver in Daniel’s suite, with its tacky, vinyl, college-issued furniture and its mismatched plates. It was another to host him at a sit-down dinner, eating off the matched set of dishware Peter’s parents had gifted us as a moving-in present.

“What’s got you so freaked out?” Peter asked. “It’s just like last time, except this time you know he’s coming in advance. I can play up the jealous boyfriend if I tell Izzy. She won’t care; her parents are California hippies.”

I tried to still the anxious motions of my hands, fruitlessly smoothing down my hair and fiddling with my shirt collar – not one of Peter’s, this time, because I needed the familiarity of my own clothes, an armor against this unfamiliar situation. Peter was right, of course; this would have been easy if I hadn’t told Oliver the truth.

Or if I had told Peter the truth before this moment.

There was nothing for it. Guilt pricked me on.

“No, don’t tell Izzy, I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. And I told him, anyway.”

The hurt that flashed across Peter’s face, not smoothed quickly enough, was entirely expected. “When?”

“At the end of last year. I’m sorry, I should have told you, I know I promised you’d be the first to know, you had just already left and I didn’t know how to say it over the phone, and nothing came of it anyway and I didn’t want to worry you.”

Peter blinked. Shook his head. Then he laughed, having come to some sort of forgiveness, in that gentle, understanding manner he sometimes adopted with me when I got too in my head about what he might think or how he might react to something I had said or done. He could make all the jokes about sounding like his father he wanted, but I was always pathetically grateful for it.

“And?”

“And he asked what I’d do if I kissed me.”

Peter whistled. “Based on your stress levels right now I’m guessing you said no?”

Of course I had. I would have told Peter immediately if I had said yes. From Oliver’s office, even; commandeered his phone and given Peter the news in between kisses.

Gross, Peter said. If I ever did kiss Oliver, I was under no circumstances to involve Peter in the process. “But why didn’t you?”

I still hadn’t figured that out for myself. Because he had been leaving again, I supposed. Because it was too like when he had left me before, or when he had pulled away from me at Christmas, right before he told me he couldn’t handle being with me and I took it so badly that I severed our friendship for over a year. Because he hadn’t given me the time to make up my mind before he tried to tell me his. Because I was still just a stupid kid who didn’t know what I wanted, maybe.

“Okay, well, you’re not a stupid kid, but those other reasons all make sense.” Peter laughed, disbelief and humor fighting for preeminence in his voice. “I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“You were in Thailand?” I tried.

“I left you my phone number, asshole.”

Even the relief of finally being honest with Peter and Peter’s good-humored ribbing couldn’t distract me from my nerves for long, and soon enough I was back to tugging at the hem of my shirt, trying to straighten wrinkles that weren’t there. Peter rolled his eyes and stilled my fidgeting with an exasperated touch to my wrist, taking my hands in his and holding them under his chin to keep them still. “You’re gonna do fine, okay? Maybe you can’t see how far you’ve come, but I can. You’ll be fine.”

Which was how Oliver found us, walking through the door with Gabriele at his heels, shopping bags in hand: my hands held tight in Peter’s, Peter’s eyes boring into mine.

“Déjà vu,” Oliver said. I had no idea whether he was joking or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how people decide where to end chapters; I tried like five configurations of the next three chapters and changed my mind again literally right before I posted this. Watch it be the worst iteration I could have chosen too lmao
> 
> But c'est la vie and anyway since this is essentially the first half of an obscenely long chapter, the second half will be here very shortly!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> True to my word, I _also_ changed my mind about chapter length minutes before posting this one. I imagine I will never not do this.

I looked to Peter in panic, completely unable to look back at Oliver or find something to say to make the scene he had stumbled into look any better. Peter raised his eyebrows in a complicated motion intended to convey _something_ , though I couldn’t tell what. But then, he could see Oliver and I couldn’t, so maybe there was something important in that regard he felt needed communicating.

Gabriele broke the tension.

“Do I have to make a ‘no fucking in the living room’ rule for you as well, Elio?”

My head twisted over my shoulder and my eyes jerked helplessly back to Oliver, hoping to see how he might react to an insinuation that Peter and I were a couple now that he knew we weren’t, but his face was carefully blank. I remembered that now, this merely looked like Peter bucking me up for a difficult encounter, which might hurt more. How would I have felt if I had walked in to his office only to see his elusive coworker looking at him like Peter was looking at me, with such concern and care? I would have been devastated to learn that seeing me was such a daunting experience that he needed a pep talk beforehand.

Peter dropped my hands, clapped me once on the shoulder, and fairly shoved me into Oliver’s arms, eerily reminiscent of how he had pushed me on Thanksgiving the year before, when the whole spiraling lie had begun, with a hissed _take his bags._

I silently, obediently accepted the shopping bags from Oliver, clinking with the weight of four or five bottles of wine. I realized I hadn’t told Oliver how many people were coming. The offering was a blessing, though, if only because liquor stores tended to be more diligent about checking ID than bars were and explaining that the wine was for a religious celebration didn’t often sway them.

There was no one but the four of us in the apartment; Oliver was early, and the rest of the guests weren’t slated to arrive for another fifteen minutes at least. Gabriele and Oliver stood awkwardly in the doorway for several more seconds before Gabriele peeled off towards the kitchenette, which left Oliver and I staring at each other from a much closer distance than was normally socially acceptable. I thought I heard Peter snicker behind me.

“Sit anywhere,” I managed, waving a vague arm in the direction of our mismatched furniture. The table and chairs were a matched set, but the rest of it we had picked up here and there. Peter said it made the apartment look bohemian. Gabriele said it was tacky, and I had to agree. I wasn’t sure whether I minded if Oliver thought it was tacky; we were university students, after all. Mismatched furniture was part of the experience.

“I’m not sure which furniture is safe,” Oliver drawled, the same Oliver I remembered from the year before and all our time together three summers ago. The Oliver of the Socratic dialogue had been an aberration, then, a front. I was strangely relieved. I didn’t think I could handle an Oliver so openly, transparently flirtatious.

Peter’s laugh broke the spell hanging over us and I could move again, backing away from Oliver to allow him entrance further into the room. “All of the furniture’s safe. Gabriele is just a prude. Don’t mind the dark spot on the couch, either; Elio spilled a whole bottle of peach schnapps on it.”

Oliver choked. Some things never changed.

I protested that I had been experimenting, realized how that must have sounded to Oliver, and tried to backtrack by explaining that I had been trying to make a screw-against-the-wall but we hadn’t had any orange juice. Judging by Oliver’s face, my backtracking hadn’t been as successful as I had hoped. Perhaps naming the drink had been a mistake.

Then Peter winked and said, “watch, next he’ll tell you he invented the cosmo,” and I knew he had done it to give me the upper hand.

But then Oliver said, “so you drink things besides wine now,” and I didn’t know how to answer except to say “I make a mean martini.” That shut him up.

See, Oliver, I thought, I am an adult. I might act like a stupid kid around him, but I wasn’t the seventeen-year-old in Rome who couldn’t handle his drink anymore. I was a nineteen-year-old who could mix his own drinks and hosted dinner parties just like my parents. I was his equal, or closer to his equal than I had been when he had first deemed me worthy of his attention. I would not be intimidated by his strange flirtatious games, even if I sometimes needed Peter as my hype man.

Oliver and I had fallen into one of our odd, intense staring contests, so the reminder that there were other people in the room jolted us both. Oliver looked guilty, and I wondered what memories, exactly, my mention of martinis in Rome had dredged up in him.

“He’s a _terrible_ wine snob,” Peter said, and Gabriele said “no, he just has _taste,_ ” which Peter countered with, “I’m French and even I don’t have as many opinions about wine as Elio has.”

In truth, I had deliberately cultivated opinions about wine in the months before I had moved to the States in the hopes that I might seem like a cultured European, and Oliver’s smirk told me he knew that. But he only indicated the shopping bags still dangling uselessly from my hands and said, “well, tonight we’re drinking Manischewitz, so kindly keep your opinions to yourself.”

As if scripted, Daniel took this as his cue to appear in the doorway with Anna to tell a story of getting drunk on Kosher wine at his younger sister’s bat mitzvah, which Anna echoed with a recollection of raiding her parents’ wine cellar at sixteen. This sort of rebelliousness was unfamiliar to me, as someone with incredibly lenient parents, but Oliver smiled and said, “you’re making me feel old,” so maybe it was an American thing.

“Someone’s got to keep you humble, now that Elio’s singlehandedly resurrected the legacy of hot grad student,” Anna said.

“Who’s a hot grad student? Oh shit, Gabe, you didn’t tell me your Columbia friend was such a dreamboat.”

And that was Izzy, with a brash candor I still wasn’t used to even after nearly a month. It made my shy, introverted hackles rise, but Oliver was immediately charmed, laughing and introducing himself. I had to admire Izzy’s talent at shocking people out of their discomfort, even if it tended to have the opposite effect on me. Yet another American cultural quirk I hadn’t quite gotten used to.

The group settled into small talk until Rebecca arrived with her roommate Nina, and if I didn’t look at Oliver for too many seconds at a time, it almost felt normal. I could tell that he was overwhelmed, even though he hid it beneath his brash _Americano_ persona, but I had no idea how to help him even if the thought hadn’t made me break out in a sweat. I had invited him and he had accepted; he must have known what he was getting himself into. He had said the holidays were difficult without friends, and now he had them.

Or maybe he had come because _I_ had invited him. Maybe it was my company he wanted and playing nice with my friends was the price he paid for that privilege. Surely not; Oliver had never needed to resort to the childish, underhanded tactics I had used to get his attention. If Oliver wanted me alone, he would have said it outright.

With Rebecca and Nina’s arrival and our party complete, the meal could begin, and having food to eat seemed to burn away the last of Oliver’s unease. Nina wanted to know what a graduate student was doing at our dinner, and when Gabriele explained _his_ relationship with Oliver – which I was grateful for, because it meant I didn’t have to evasively rehash mine – she was full of questions, and the night was up and running.

At some point, I looked up from a debate with Peter and Gabriele over who ought to do the dishes and caught Oliver looking at me. I knew what he was thinking; the camaraderie and cross-talk reminded me so strongly of dinner drudgery with my parents that for the first time in months, I was homesick. It helped, a little, to know that he was too.

Our guests peeled off slowly; Rebecca left first, after thanking us for “the least Jewish Rosh Hashanah I’ve ever been to,” taking Nina with her. Daniel and Anna followed shortly after, which everyone else took as a signal to call it a night.

I had lost the dishes debate, since Gabriele had cooked. Peter might have offered to split the burden with me, but Oliver said he would stay and help, since all he had brought was wine, and so Peter very pointedly announced that he would be spending the night at Izzy’s.

“Uh, okay?” Izzy said, and I knew that by the time I saw her next, she would know the nature of Peter’s and my relationship before she had met me. I only hoped Peter’s estimation of her California-hippie upbringing was accurate.

Gabriele had helped clear the table, but once the rest of our guests had left and only Oliver remained, he begged off, with a significant look between the two of us and a rapid-fire burst of Italian that left Oliver standing, perplexed, alone in the kitchenette with me.

“What was that?” Oliver asked.

I hesitated. I couldn’t quite be sure I’d heard correctly, myself. Gabriele couldn’t have meant what I thought he’d meant. “’You owe me an explanation, Elio. I’m going to go listen to Mahler and we’ll talk in the morning.’”

Listen to Mahler? What did that mean?

“It’s a – a joke. Mahler number eight – the symphony of a thousand.”

“I know it.”

Gabriele had played it at full volume the first time Izzy slept over. Eight horns cover a lot of sins, he said.

So that was… tacit permission, yes.

“Should I be expecting horns?”

“Depends on how much noise we make.”

I had only meant that we might make noise in doing the dishes, but Oliver’s face went unreadable and his voice took on an odd, soft quality I had never heard in it. He tried several times to say something, before evidently thinking better of it and settling on a bewildered murmur of my name.

I couldn’t think about that. Not right now, not when I still hadn’t figured out what he wanted from me, not when he had flirted with me in front of a room full of strangers for his own gain and then reverted to barely speaking. I didn’t know what he _wanted_. There probably hadn’t ever been a time when I would have been able to read him well enough to know what he was thinking in that moment, but even if there had, it was gone and I was adrift.

I did the dishes as intently as I could.

Oliver took the hint, clearing his throat and stepping in beside me to dry. “I didn’t know he knew.”

“Neither did I.”

“What will you tell him in the morning?”

“The truth, I guess.” I had never been a particularly good liar, and neither had Peter, and I had already put Peter in enough uncomfortable positions for my sake when it came to Oliver. I couldn’t force him to lie for me again, especially not to a friend.

“If I leave now,” Oliver said, staring down at the glass in his hands like the words would be too difficult for him to say if he looked at me. He looked small, and upset, and _guilty_ , and I realized that I had been cruel to him.

“Then we’ll never talk about this.”

That was what he had wanted, in his office in May. Not to kiss me, but to have the talk we had never had, the one I had declined the first night we spent together and had been putting off ever since. He wanted to know where we stood as much as I did, but just as he had been, back in Italy, he was afraid of frightening me by bringing it up.

He proved me right by glancing up at me, worried, and back down to the glass when he couldn’t immediately tell my feelings on my face. “Is that what you want?”

I couldn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to talk, but because I didn’t deal well with surprises, and this new information had forced me to rethink what I had assumed about our relationship. I didn’t want to have a conversation until I had sorted through my own feelings.

Oliver tried again. “If he hears the door slam, and I’m not here in the morning – “

That made me angry. I didn’t need protecting. Just because I needed time to think did not mean I was afraid, or that I wanted to hide. I didn’t need Oliver to treat me like a child again. That had been the nice thing about our stalemate; at least then we had been equals.

“The damage is done. I won’t lie to him.”

“You’re braver than I am, then,” Oliver said, laughing, but it sounded like regret. He didn’t know that I hadn’t been brave enough to tell anyone, that people seemed to just look at me and figure it out on their own. That I wasn’t as good at pretending as he was.

I laughed, too, in the hopes that it might soften the blow. “No, I’m just a bad liar. If I was braver I would have…”

But I didn’t know what I would have, didn’t know how I might have finished that sentence. And Oliver looked so expectant, so cautiously hopeful, that I could do nothing but hug him, _finally,_ uncaring that I was getting soap all over the back of his shirt, and tuck my head into the crook of his neck the way I had dreamed of so many times even if I had tried not to let myself.

His arms around my shoulders were light, unsure. “What do you want, Elio?”

“I don’t know.”

It was the most honest I could be, and I could still feel when it stung him, as his body sagged a little under my hands. “I’m sorry if you didn’t want me here tonight. If you felt obligated, because of what I said.”

I didn’t mind. I had, at the beginning of the night, but I had gotten over it, and now I was glad he had been there, that he had seen me this way, that I had seen _him_ at ease in my space. I could tell he didn’t believe me.

I felt him start to pull away and I let him, because I didn’t know what would happen if I held him tighter and the middle of my kitchen was not the place to find out, but before he could fully draw back, Gabriele stepped into the archway separating the living room and the kitchenette. The light of the room behind him cast shadows over his face, hiding his expression from me, and his voice was quiet and emotionless when he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to – I only meant to say… you never close your curtains. I wanted to make sure you didn’t forget, tonight.”

Oliver completed his withdrawal, smiling and stepping away to turn and face Gabriele. The back of his shirt was soaked. “I wouldn’t want to deprive him of the moonlight. It’s late.”

I walked Oliver to the door in silence.

We stood before each other, his coat draped over one arm, my hands still slippery with soap, unsure of how to part ways now that we had crossed that physical boundary of _to hug or not to hug._ He laughed, again, shaking out his coat in front of him, and that, it seemed, signaled the end of any possibility of closeness between us tonight. “Do you hate me? I can never tell if you do.”

Did I? Sometimes, yes, when he confused me or teased me or disappointed me. But mostly, when he was away, I ached for him, and hated him for _making_ me ache. I hated him because I _didn’t_ hate him, and my life would be so much simpler if I did.

“I’ve hated you many times, Oliver. It never seems to stick.”

Oliver smiled at that, shrugging on his coat. “Later, then. When it’s had some time to wear off again.” He kissed me on the cheek, a closed-mouthed, European farewell, and was gone.

I stood in the doorway for several minutes after Oliver had disappeared, unable to move. Everything that had transpired between us in the kitchenette seemed suddenly ridiculous.

Finally, as if my body had decided without any input from my brain that I must look like an idiot just standing there with my hands still covered in soap, and my feet led me on autopilot to the couch before my legs gave out and I collapsed there next to the schnapps stain, trying not to cry.

I was confused. I had wanted him, when I hugged him, and I thought he had wanted me. But I had been confused then, too, and he had seen it and pulled back. I didn’t know whether I should thank him or hate him for that alongside everything else. _Later, then._ A talk? Another hug? The thing I couldn’t think about, the thing Gabriele had assumed when he offered to play Mahler?

Or had I ruined it all, again, with my indecision? At what point would he get tired of waiting for me to make up my mind?

Gabriele sat gingerly next to me, apologetic. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to force your hand. I thought – you spent so much time alone with him, I thought you’d already –“

“We have. But before, back in Italy.”

Gabriele nodded, as if he had known that for a long time. Maybe he had. I had never known him to be particularly reticent when it came to saying things he suspected about other people, but perhaps this fell into the category of things he didn’t feel he could adequately express and therefore avoided saying altogether.

“He broke your heart,” he said.

I laughed at that, because it was the same conclusion I had come to, initially, and had spent the last twelve months re-examining. “I broke my own heart, I think.”

Gabriele rose from the couch and left me to my maudlin self-flagellation, and I thought that meant our conversation was over, but twenty minutes later, when Peter and Izzy entered the room, I realized he had merely left to call in reinforcements. And those reinforcements, it seemed, had brought alcohol much more suited to the mood of the room than leftover Manischewitz.

“He’s jealous,” Izzy said, situating herself on the floor and leaning back against Peter’s shins. There wasn’t room for her on the couch; there was barely room for Peter, Gabriele and I, sandwiched much closer than I wanted to be in my current state. She passed the bottle of bottom-shelf vodka to me.

I had been right, then; Peter had told her. And he had been right, because not only did she seem perfectly fine with it, she had developed vocal, detailed opinions in the forty-five minutes since.

I passed it back. The gesture was appreciated, but even as Jew of Discretion I was not about to spend Rosh Hashana getting drunk on three-dollar vodka.

“Of who?”

“You. He envies you.”

Why on earth would he envy _me?_ If anything, he must have been exasperated with me.

“Because you have us. I bet if you called him right now, he’d be sitting alone with his dog, imagining you here with us.”

Could he really? It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility; hadn’t he been doing just that, when I had called him from Peter’s house? Ordinarily it might have been conceited to imagine that I occupied so much of his thoughts, but after the conversation we had just had, and considering that I had done nothing but sit on schnapps couch and think about _him_ … perhaps it wasn’t so absurd.

“Call him and find out,” Izzy said. I protested that I had already interrupted their night, it would be rude, but Izzy simply accepted the bottle, stole my seat, and turned to Gabriele with a decisive, “don’t be a martyr. Gabe, make commedia make sense to me.”

I obediently headed towards the phone, Gabriele’s “my parents are apricot farmers, not actors,” drifting after me. Izzy had the spirit of a drill sergeant, and even if she didn’t, calling Oliver was what I wanted to do anyway. I had just needed the push.

Oliver picked up on the first ring. “Elio?”

How had he known? He must have been doing exactly what Izzy said, sitting there and agonizing over our talk and Gabriele’s interruption just as I had been. I hated when people were so right about me and Oliver. If only they could give me some of their insight, maybe things like this wouldn’t keep happening.

“Hey,” I said, inadequately.

“Are you okay?”

Yeah. I was okay. I didn’t ask the same of him.

Was I alone? No, Peter and Gabriele were here. Had that gone okay? Yeah, it had. Thank god.

“You’re so lucky, Elio. I don’t know if you know that,” Oliver said.

I was. I knew that. I might have felt sorry for myself for twenty minutes, but I had done it from the comfort of schnapps couch, while Oliver had sat on a cold plastic subway seat and felt guilty about it, and then I had poured my heart out to friends who understood and accepted me while Oliver maybe did the same to his dog. And while a dog might be unconditionally accepting, I knew it wasn’t the same.

“Izzy said you’d say that.”

I could hear Oliver’s fond smile through the phone. “She’s smart. You should listen to her more often.” Then, a relieved, shaky exhale. He hadn’t just been upset, I realized, he had been scared. For me. “You have no idea the things I was imagining. Insults, slurs, accusations –“

“Gabriele wouldn’t do that.”

“People change, sometimes, when they know.”

Wondering who Oliver had told, who had reacted so badly to knowing about him to make him worry the same had had happened to me, made me uncomfortable, so I changed the subject. “What kind of dog is Paul?”

Oliver sounded startled, but he let me. Maybe he didn’t want to think about it either. “A golden retriever.”

Such an American dog. Guilty as charged, he said.

“Will we ever be normal friends, Oliver?” It came out plaintive, but I couldn’t help it; the release of telling the story to Peter and Izzy had loosened my tongue and hearing the relief in his voice when he had picked up the phone had done funny things to my self-restraint. That hug _had_ meant something, and I needed to know if whatever that was meant we could never come back from it. If we were to be lovers or nothing.

“Is that what you want us to be?”

That was the question Oliver always asked, over and over, always checking to make sure he wasn’t overstepping. _Is this what you want?_ Sometimes I wished he would make up my mind for me. But the one time he had done that, when we had slept together and he had asked if I wanted to stop and I hadn’t answered, it had almost ruined things. That was why he was so insistent on asking, now.

I wanted to be sure of him, of where we stood. I didn’t want to keep second-guessing, keep wondering what a touch meant or a look or a word. I wanted to talk with him the way we had talked on the rock after our first night together and know that neither of us expected anything. Maybe then, given space to think, I could decide what else I might want.

“Friends, then,” he said.

“I turn twenty next month.”

Oliver knew; of course he knew, even if he had tried not to think about it while we were sleeping together. “Is that an invitation?” His voice was arch, teasing, perfectly friendly – but the kind of friendly I had never dreamed we might achieve, the kind of friendly I was with Peter or Daniel or Gabriele. I had made the right choice.

“If you want it to be.”

By the time I hung up, Izzy and Peter had disappeared into Peter’s bedroom, and Gabriele was alone on the couch with the vodka.

“Mahler?” I asked.

“Not for the reason I thought, but probably,” Gabriele replied, in Italian. I thought this might be a conversation he would rather have in the language he felt most comfortable with. “Was Izzy right?”

She usually was.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I probably should. But I really, really didn’t.

A week after Oliver and I had officially decided to be friends-now-something-else-later-maybe – or at least that was what I considered our pact to have been – my schedule lined up with Laurie’s.

We got coffee at a small café just off Columbia’s campus, and while I spent the entire date nervous about running into Oliver there, Laurie was funny and engaging enough to mostly keep my mind off it. She was a freshman history major and, I quickly realized, interested in me half because of who my father was. I didn’t mind that as much as I might have thought I would; it was nice to discuss his work with someone other than Oliver.

She didn’t push me too hard to talk about myself, which I didn’t understand until we were gathering our coats and she said, “thanks for this, it’s been nice.”

“That’s not usually what someone says after a successful date.”

Laurie patted me on the arm like I’d just said something funny, but I had no idea what it was. “Elio, you’re head over heels for someone else right now.”

Oh. Sorry.

“No hard feelings,” Laurie said. “Call me if you ever get over her.”

_If._

Daniel thought it was hilarious that I had gone on a date which ended with me paying for our food and giving her my father’s mailing address, and insisted on calling me Elio _Perlman_ whenever he saw me where people who might care could hear him. Oliver overheard him do it, once, passing us in the hallway of Hamilton as we waited for Anna to pack up her things so we could head out for a rare bar night.

“Is there something I’m missing?” he asked, looking from me to Daniel. Daniel looked prepared to give him that backstory, but while Oliver and I were now _normal friends_ , it was still very _new_ and there was no reason to strain it by bringing up the date he had intentionally set me up on. Nothing had come of it, so it didn’t matter, I thought, stepping discreetly on Daniel’s foot.

Daniel, undeterred, said, “Elio got coffee with that girl and it turned out all she wanted to do was talk about his dad. I’m trying to be his wingman.”

I had begun my perfunctory, rote protests that I didn’t want to meet people based solely on who my father was when Oliver said, casually, “isn’t that how we met?”

Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I liked _normal friends._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just know that there is literally no place I could have ended this chapter that wouldn't have left you feeling the way you're probably feeling right now. lol. And ALSO that the next chapter contains Thanksgiving round two, which is maybe my... fourth favorite scene in this whole fic? So get hyped for that, 'cause I am.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Thanksgiviiiiiing
> 
> You ask for vulnerable Oliver and I deliver lmao
> 
> (Oliver kind of gets put through the wringer in this one, yikes. It pays off down the line (twice!) but I've added a stronger tag for homophobia, and this is your warning here that this chapter obliquely discusses negative offscreen reactions to coming out.)

In the end, Oliver did not attend my birthday. He said he felt uncomfortable going to a bar with minors, which I couldn’t fault him for. His interactions with my friends already toed the bounds of propriety, even if none of them were his students anymore. His interactions with _me_ were… something beyond propriety. So I understood, even if I missed his presence.

Even without Oliver there, it was perhaps the best birthday I had ever had, save those in my early childhood when even the modest number of presents my parents gave me seemed like the largest pile of gifts in the world, even if they were destined to be broken and discarded within the month. We went to the bar partly because it was our custom, and partly because holding a party at my apartment wouldn’t have felt different from any other Saturday night.

But if I was honest with myself, I was glad Oliver wasn’t there. If he had been, I would have been watching myself – and him – all night, hedging my behavior to accord with what I thought he would find worthy of his friendship. Absent his presence, I could follow Izzy’s directive to “get absolutely _trashed”_ without worrying about how it looked.

The night became more of a blur as it went on, since people kept buying me drinks. Daniel and Rebecca, fence solidly mended, hijacked the jukebox in the corner to play a series of the Greatest of the Eighties American hits, raising their glasses with a terribly-enunciated _salute!_ each time I guessed a title wrong. After a while, Gabriele wandered over to our corner and picked up the toast with an even more egregious accent.

The party broke up at two am, if only because the bar was closing, and the four of us headed in the direction of my apartment stumbled home. Once in the door, Gabriele collapsed on schnapps couch and was out within seconds, and Peter and Izzy disappeared into Peter’s bedroom, the trajectory of their night quite clear despite Izzy’s repeated whiskey-dick jokes. But I felt that just going to sleep, after such a hectic night, would be an anticlimactic end to a birthday.

So I called Oliver.

Oliver sounded mostly asleep when he picked up the phone on the second-to-last ring, with a mumbled “who is this?” and when I said _Elio_ he just sighed it back to me.

My brain felt fuzzy and Oliver’s voice over the phone always did strange things to my mind, and I forgot why I had called. Quite possibly I hadn’t had a reason in the first place, just a drunken belief that this could ever be a good idea.

“It’s my birthday.”

“Not anymore it’s not,” Oliver said, voice breaking on a yawn.

There was a yelp from Peter’s room and the thud of someone tripping into a wall, so familiar to me from a year of living with Peter, followed by a giggle and the sound of a belt hitting the floor. I prayed Oliver couldn’t hear it through the phone; I felt like I had unintentionally made him a voyeur, which made me uncomfortable on behalf of all parties involved.

“Are you calling to invite me to the after party?” Oliver said, trying for teasing but landing, with his sleepy-soft rasp, closer to fond.

“I think that’s a private party.”

I heard a rustle, and I suddenly wondered where in Oliver’s apartment his phone was. In his kitchen, surely. He had probably slid to the floor in exhaustion. I had only heard his clothes against the wall, his shirt rucking up as it caught on the wallpaper or molding. Or perhaps he had an extension beside his bed, perhaps a remnant from the time when he had someone to call at night who wasn’t me, someone whose calls he would willingly take at two am. Although, I realized, the kind of drunk conclusion that feels like enlightenment, he had taken mine.

I heard his head thump back against the wall. The kitchen, then. I had no right to be disappointed. “Is Gabriele playing Mahler?”

I glanced over at the couch. He was dead to the world.

“Why did you call, Elio?” Oliver sounded so tired. I shouldn’t have called.

“I wanted you to wish me a happy birthday.”

“Happy birthday.”

“I wanted you here tonight,” I said quietly, an admission I could only make when drunk, even to myself. Of course I had wanted him there. I would never not want him there, even if it made me self-conscious to know he might be looking at me. I wanted him to look at me, friends or not. I wanted to be the kind of person he called from his bedside extension.

I would feel differently in the morning, but in that moment I ached for him.

“Go to sleep, Elio.”

“Oliver,” I said. I didn’t know whether it was his name or mine.

Oliver laughed, just once, a gentle reprimand. “Go to sleep.”

If things with Oliver were confusing, things with James were less so. James – Jamie, as he instructed me to call him, now that we were officially _normal friends_ – was still beautiful and he still looked too much like Oliver, but the better I got to know him the better I could keep them separate in my mind.

Jamie’s charismatic openness was not a cover for shyness like Oliver’s was; he just didn’t see any reason he shouldn’t be confident in himself. That was completely foreign to me, and I couldn’t help but admire it in others. He reminded me a bit of Izzy, in that way. But unlike Izzy, his jokes were often directed at himself, in a self-effacing sort of humor that pre-empted any accusations of vanity one might levy against him.

He was humble about nearly everything; compliments rolled right off his back. It had frustrated me, at first, but soon I began to view it as a challenge. Surely there was _something_ I could say that would fluster him. But no matter how kind – or how strange – the compliment was, Jamie would wave it away as if it were a lie. I even chanced to call him good-looking, once, to which he said, “you say that now, but I was a very unfortunate-looking child. I exceeded expectations.”

“Your parents had expectations for how attractive you would be?”

“Didn’t yours?”

But that was the closest I dared go to saying anything that might read as more-than-friendly. It wasn’t flirting, not by any metric, and I didn’t intend for it to be, but it still felt dangerous. Sometimes, when we were alone together in a practice room and I looked at him a moment too long, maybe, or smiled at him a little too brightly, he would take a breath and let it out, or open his mouth like he was about to speak, like he was waiting for me to confess.

But I couldn’t, not when I didn’t know whether I found him attractive because he reminded me of Oliver or because he _didn’t._ And not until I knew what I wanted from him; I wasn’t even sure I wanted him to know I liked men at all. That made me feel guilty; that it was alright if the rest of my friends knew, but not if Jamie did. But I couldn’t help but remember Oliver saying _people change, when they know_.

And I wasn’t even sure I _could_ confess. The only person I had ever successfully told was Oliver, and even then he had helped me along.

It was easier, in those moments, to look away.

Instead, I found myself agonizing over whether to invite Oliver to friendsgiving, again hosted at my apartment. It seemed likely to be fraught, after what had happened the last time we had eaten a meal together. On the one hand, we had decided to be friends, and this was a _friends_ giving. And Oliver had told me how much holiday invitations meant to him. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure if my heart and nerves could take it.

For once, my inability to make decisions worked out well, because Oliver made the decision for me by announcing, in the first week of November, that he would be going home to visit his family for Thanksgiving. It had been too long since he’d seen them, he said.

It should have made me happy, but I remembered throwing Oliver’s relationship with his family in his face during our confrontation in May and wondered how he felt about returning; of how long it had been, exactly, and why he had stayed away.

I thought Oliver had made the right choice after all when, in the week before Thanksgiving, my friendsgiving plans slowly fell apart. Anna and Peter had decided to introduce Daniel and Izzy to their respective families and Rebecca said there was no point in a three-person friendsgiving, so by the time Thanksgiving break rolled around it was once again just me and Gabriele.

Neither of us had any strong feelings on how to celebrate a holiday we had no cultural investment in, so Thanksgiving itself found us in the apartment, idly tossing out possible anti-Thanksgiving plans. One of the only two things Gabriele knew about Thanksgiving, he said, was that the original Pilgrims had worn funny hats, so we could visit thrift stores and try on discount Halloween costumes. I thought that sounded like a better way to spend the afternoon than lying on the living room carpet drawing cartoon turkeys, which was the other thing Gabriele knew about Thanksgiving.

“Where’s your _movie star?”_ Gabriele asked, using my mother’s nickname for Oliver, which he had overheard during one of my rare phone calls home. “Ask him to come with us so you can watch him through the dressing room curtains.”

I didn’t dignify that with a response. “He’s in Vermont.”

Gabriele flopped dramatically onto the floor beside me, landing directly on top of my small pile of crayons, purchased specially for the occasion. I heard several of them snap. He was, inexplicably, shirtless. “What’s in Vermont? Where is Vermont?”

“North of here. His family owns a farm.”

“One hundred percent all-American beefcake,” Gabriele said, nodding sagely.

“ _Where_ do you learn these words?”

Gabriele ignored my question in favor of picking a crayon at random and joining me in shading the turkey, with just a slightly different color of brown than I was using. “Do they know?”

About me or him? Either way, I didn’t know.

“It must be hard,” Gabriele said, studying the turkey intently. He had difficulty talking about my sexuality, and I knew it had been hard for him to wrap his head around it, given his upbringing and his faith. “I’m not sure I would be able to tell my family.”

He had given voice to my private worry. I hadn’t meant to push Oliver into confessing by castigating him for not having said anything, and I certainly hadn’t meant to make him feel inadequate by refusing to lie to Gabriele. If I was so reluctant to tell James, simply because I valued Oliver’s advice, could it be that he had decided to go home for Thanksgiving to follow mine?

I snatched the crayon from Gabriele’s hand and shoved him away with my shoulder, but Gabriele was too stubborn to play along, remaining by my side with our shoulders pressed together, his bare skin cold against my sweater. “I didn’t know you cared,” I said, trying for facetious.

Of course Gabriele cared; he had cared enough to give me permission to sleep with Oliver not once, but twice, before I had even confirmed that his assessment of the situation was correct. And now he made jokes about it, even though I could tell the idea still made him uncomfortable.

But he had not shifted into _okay with it_ as easily as Peter had, and that knowledge made me tread more carefully around him. It seemed safer to hedge my words, to treat things like jokes even if I _was_ grateful.

“Only because I know you don’t want me.” Gabriele’s voice was light, but the way his body went tense alongside mine betrayed what I thought might be a truth he was reluctant to admit, even to himself. “Unless you do. Then I would have to fuck you right here and we would break all these crayons.”

Even if I had wanted him, I never would have admitted it. But in this case, as with Peter, I could honestly say that no, I hadn’t.

“I’ve never really thought about it. But you’ve already broken most of them, so I think I’ll pass.”

Gabriele took it for the joke it was, and also, I thought, for the reassurance. “Never?”

“Are you disappointed?”

Gabriele was so changeable, could flip so quickly from discomfort to affront, that sometimes I struggled to keep up with him. He shrugged, easy as if he had never been tense. “A little. But I’m vain.”

And so, because I _wasn’t_ interested, and because Gabriele had shifted so easily into his performative pout and because we were lying belly-down on the living room floor on Thanksgiving, I dropped my crayons, wrapped my arm around Gabriele’s neck in an improvised headlock, and licked the side of his face. Gabriele squawked and struggled but didn’t knee me in the kidney, which he was perfectly situated to do, so I did it again.

“What does your vanity think of that?”

The situation quickly dissolved into roughhousing, and I spared a brief moment to marvel at how nice it felt to manhandle someone onto the floor and straddle him _without_ any strange sexual overtones before Gabriele twisted in an attempt to buck me off and I was forced to pin his arms to his sides in order to keep my seat.

From the kitchen, we heard the jangling of the phone. Since Gabriele was currently flat on his back with me astride his chest, it was my turn to answer it – or so Gabriele seemed to think, as he luxuriated back against the grimy carpet, hands behind his head, looking for all the world like we hadn’t just been at each other’s throats. Handsome bastard.

I knew it would be Oliver before I even picked up; we seemed to have a way of calling each other on holidays. I tried my best to smooth down my hair as I made my way to the kitchenette, even though I felt faintly ridiculous doing it. He couldn’t see my hair over the phone, and even if he could, we were _normal friends_ and _normal friends_ didn’t care what each other’s hair looked like.

Besides, Oliver had seen me with hair much more tangled than this, and by _his_ hands, not Gabriele’s.

I must have sounded out of breath on my _hello_ , because the first thing Oliver said to me was, “have you been exercising?”

The easy answer would have been to say yes, but a part of me wanted Oliver to know what I had really been doing; that I could wrestle with a handsome, shirtless man and have it mean nothing. That if friendship with Gabriele could be so easy, so could friendship with Oliver.

But “you bastard, Elio, come back here, you gave me carpet burn,” Gabriele called, and any answer I might have been able to scrape up was immediately made moot by the horrible, incorrect implications of that statement. It had been in Italian; if I was lucky; Oliver wouldn’t have been able to decipher it over the phone.

“Yeah, well maybe if you’d put on a fucking _shirt_ ,” I called back, near-rote after so many debates over what temperature was an acceptable one to insist on heating the apartment and yet walk around half-dressed.

“I will if you come and kiss it better.”

I heard Oliver’s intake of breath, or I thought I did; perhaps it was just phone static and wishful thinking. Still, I couldn’t not answer; a lack of consequences was carte blanche to continue, as far as Gabriele was concerned. “You can’t just say things like that, I’m on the _phone –”_

Oliver’s translation skills, it seemed, had remained sharp. “I’m sorry, am I interrupting?”

No, no, of course not. If he was interrupting I wouldn’t have picked up. It sounded like I was in the middle of something? Oh, yes, but no, not really. Only Gabriele.

Oliver’s strangled “oh?” alerted me to the fact that not only had he heard Gabriele and come to the conclusion any rational person would, he also wasn’t okay with it. So much for _normal friends._

Normal friends had been my idea, though, my request, and he had gone along with it because… because I had asked, I supposed. In that light, I owed him. So, rather than let the misconception lie and gear up for another seven months of lying based on a chance Thanksgiving encounter, I did my best to explain the situation.

Unfortunately, explaining that Gabriele had carpet burn because I had pinned him flat on his back because he had pinned me _first_ , and that he had pinned me because I had licked his face, and I had licked his face because he had asked if I was attracted to him, and it was all okay because I _wasn’t_ didn’t have the effect I had hoped it might.

I could still hear betrayal in Oliver’s words, which wasn’t fair. Even if Gabriele and I had been doing anything to warrant that sense of betrayal, it still _wouldn’t_ be, because Oliver and I were nothing to each other beyond friends. I could date Peter or sleep with Gabriele and that was none of Oliver’s business. But there was something else in his voice when he told me that alright, he would talk to me later, something that said my betrayal was not in wrestling with Gabriele, but in having fun without Oliver at all.

That was unlike him. Oliver had never minded me having friends of my own; we had spent most of our time apart even when we were joined at the hip. I had never known Oliver to envy my friendships, save his confession to me regarding the holidays at the beginning of the year.

Unbidden, my earlier fear of what Oliver’s thanksgiving plans might have been resurfaced, and that fear spurred me to ask, “are you okay?”

Oliver didn’t answer. “Is it just you and Gabriele?”

“Yeah, everyone else is gone.”

“Do you have plans today?”

So far we had made misshapen turkeys and Gabriele had failed to complete the act of getting dressed to leave the apartment, so I didn’t think I could call that _plans._

Gabriele, tired of being ignored in favor of whoever was on the phone, had followed me into the kitchenette. “Is that your _movie star?_ ” he asked, propping himself artlessly against the counter. Perhaps mine and Oliver’s tradition of uncomfortable holiday phone calls had not gone as unnoticed as I might have hoped. “Tell him to come celebrate anti-Thanksgiving with us.”

“I told you, he’s in Vermont,” I said, covering the receiver with my hand. It was probably too late; Gabriele’s voice carried quite well over the phone, but it seemed polite anyway. Or at least I would have felt odd talking about Oliver in the third person directly in his ear, regardless of what he had already heard.

It had been too late, which Oliver proved by saying, after an uncomfortable pause, “actually, I’m not.”

But – I had thought he’d said – had I been right? Had I, in giving him courage, ruined his Thanksgiving by proxy?

“I know,” Oliver said, in response to my silence. “I called ahead. I couldn’t bring myself to do it in person in case it went badly. Turned out to be a smart choice, so… I’m not going.”

They knew, then. About me?

About him.

That admission seemed like it should have felt momentous, but instead it felt merely like the payoff of the simmering dread that had plagued me since I had learned of Oliver’s plans to go home. I had done this. He had made the choice, and he had made it freely, but I had been the catalyst. I had caused Oliver pain.

And it wasn’t like the pain he had caused me, where I could blame it partly on my own naivete and console myself that, even if I had lost him forever, I didn’t _need_ him. I had lived my life for seventeen years without him and I could return to that. This was different, and I had no analogue for it. I didn’t know how to help.

But Gabriele had grown tired of this odd silence between us, too, and he used my distraction to sneak up behind me and drape himself, still shirtless, across my back. “Well? Is he coming?”

The cold of his bare skin through my shirt, and his bare hands in the pockets of my jeans, shocked me out of my anguished, self-recriminating daze. “Shit, don’t _do_ that,” I said, startled, and then, as the cold seeped through the thin fabric of my pockets to my thighs, “fuck, why are your hands so cold?” and, as I remembered that he was still only half-dressed, “just – put a shirt on, it’s _November._ ”

“I should let you go,” Oliver said, and I was seized with the knowledge that that was the _last_ thing he should do. Oliver should not have to be alone on Thanksgiving, and especially not alone and assuming that something more than the truth was happening between me and Gabriele. I couldn’t let this be a repeat of Christmas, amped up to ten.

“No, there’s no – look, we were probably just going to go find a bar somewhere, and I know you probably don’t want to get drunk right now, but –”

“Oh, I definitely want to get drunk,” Oliver said darkly.

“Bring booze,” Gabriele said. We really ought to invest in a better phone.

I forwarded the message on to Oliver, but with the caveat that if Oliver came over, Gabriele had to put a shirt on. He agreed, if only to protect Oliver’s _delicate American sensibilities._

I loved Gabriele, but he could be exhausting at times.

Oliver brought a _lot_ of booze, which said more about his emotional state than any of the words he had spoken to me over the phone. I had only ever really seen him drink in moderation, but then, I had never seen him after what I assumed to have been an unpleasant confrontation with his family about his marital status.

I did my best to keep him distracted, and so did Gabriele, as if he had heard more of Oliver’s quiet words to me than he let on. I walked the two of them through the cocktails I knew how to make, and Oliver showed us the _proper_ way to draw turkeys, as he called it, by tracing our hands with our fingers splayed out to form the head and tail. The real proper way to do it, he said, was to glue maple leaves on as well, to which Gabriele said, “let’s find some.”

Unfortunately, our leaf hunt did not prove fruitful. We passed by several piles of what I thought were maple leaves but Oliver declared to be sycamores and therefore inferior before finally admitting defeat and ducking into a bar, as per our original plan.

“You’re very privileged to be here today,” Gabriele said gravely. “Few people have witnessed what you are about to witness.”

“That’s only because no one else ever wants to play,” I pointed out.

Oliver looked between Gabriele and me, uncomprehending. “Play what?”

So Gabriele and I introduced Oliver to our favorite bar game, which we could only play by ourselves or with Peter, since anyone else out with us for the night would complain loudly any time it was suggested: inventing ridiculous cocktails and insisting they were very common in Europe when questioned about it.

Oliver said his American accent would give him away too quickly to participate, but he gamely watched as Gabriele ordered a “ah, _come se dice…_ how do you say in English – _porcuspino?_ Porcupine? Blushing porcupine,” which was just an old fashioned with a single maraschino cherry stuck with as many toothpicks as structurally feasible, and I asked for “the unsinkable ship” – a vodka tonic with a single ice cube in it. Very avant garde, I claimed.

“It is insensitive in their culture, Elio,” Gabriele stage-whispered, while Oliver smothered laughter and ordered a Metropolitan, because “it’s New York. It’s fitting.”

After trying and failing to tie a knot in his cherry stem with his tongue and being rebuffed when he offered it to first me, then Oliver, Gabriele retreated to a booth along the wall to sulk, and Oliver and I followed. His sulk deepened when Oliver successfully built a teepee out of the toothpicks and, in an effort to soothe Gabriele’s wounded pride, explained that he had been a boy scout.

“But you couldn’t even find any leaves,” Gabriele grumbled. So we downed our drinks and resumed our search.

After our second bar, where Oliver confidently ordered a “grande, allettante Americano” – a tall, sexy American, he explained, to the bartender’s _this isn’t a Starbucks_ – the consensus was reached that we should try a park.

I had revised my assumption that I had never seen Oliver overindulge; it had now become clear to me that even if I had, I wouldn’t have known, because Oliver handled his liquor _very_ well. It was probably his height.

Gabriele did not, scampering ahead of us through Central Park kicking up leaf piles and proclaiming in two languages that the pilgrims were murderers and American football was stupid to anyone nearby. These leaves were too soggy to be any use, Oliver said, so he and I just walked, much more sedately and less conspicuously than Gabriele.

I hadn’t dressed for such a prolonged outing, and I had never tolerated the cold well, despite what Gabriele said about my penchant for wearing flimsy American clothing. Oliver noticed me shivering.

He hesitated, and I saw it, before putting an arm over my shoulder to draw me into the warmth of his side. I didn’t know whether his hesitation was because someone might see, or because he wasn’t sure that sort of touch was alright. Perhaps not surprising, after how our last hug had gone. “Are you okay?”

“Are _you?”_

“Probably not.”

I didn’t have any answer for that.

The sun was low in the sky by the time we made it, drunk and leafless, back to the apartment. Oliver was clearly still reluctant to return to his lonely apartment, sans even his dog, since Paul had already been handed off to a boy down the hall who watched him when Oliver was away in anticipation of the Thanksgiving holiday. It was my turn to hesitate for just a second before offering what I knew was most likely a bad idea.

“Look, we’ve got a perfectly good couch, if you don’t want to go home just yet. Even if it does smell like schnapps.”

It was the least I could do, I told myself.

“Or if you don’t like peaches, you can crash in Elio’s room and I’ll listen to – ow! What did I say?” Gabriele yelped, rubbing at his bicep where I had punched him. Oliver’s face had gone pink, but his mouth twitched in a smile. How far we had come since this day one year ago when Peter had introduced himself as _Peach_ and Oliver had choked on his own breath.

Oliver graciously declined; he was getting over a cold and he was sure the couch would be fine, but did we have a spare toothbrush? We didn’t, but there was a bodega down the street that would, so Oliver and I headed back out into the cold.

Once we were safely out of Gabriele’s preternaturally sensitive earshot, I turned to Oliver.

“How are you, really?”

Oliver shrugged, maintaining his pace. I thought maybe it was easier for him to speak if he could pretend he was looking at his feet out of necessity, rather than defeat. “They might never speak to me again.”

That was worse than I had thought. What had he _told_ them?

“I said I wasn’t getting married. And that I probably never could.”

“I'm sorry, Oliver.”

I was. I would never know, _could_ never know, what he was feeling. My parents loved me, and they had given me more acceptance and support than I could have dreamed of, if the thought of telling them about myself had ever even crossed my mind before they figured it out on their own. I didn’t know how to say that I hated his parents, if only for making him look so lost and so uprooted, or that I wished I could share mine with him. And that last sentiment likely would have been taken the wrong way, even if I could articulate it.

“If I’d done this two years ago,” he began, but now was not the time, not when he was shellshocked and seeking comfort. We still hadn’t talked, but I couldn’t be sure he wanted to now for the right reasons, or that he wouldn’t regret having the conversation once I was properly out of his sight.

I laughed, though it sounded forced to my ears, and opened the door to the bodega with what I hoped looked like finality. The bell jingled as if to punctuate my words or to mock me; I couldn’t tell which. “High school romances never last.”

Oliver looked like he might protest, but we were now inside the warmth and bright light of the shop, and it was as if the real world had suddenly caught up with him, the world in which we had stopped speaking for over a year and could only be this vulnerable with each other for snatches of time, once every few months. He shook his head and laughed, heading for the toothbrushes. “I can’t believe I went bar-hopping with two twenty-year-olds. The department chair would have my head if he knew.”

On our way back, Oliver spotted a pile of perfectly-preserved maple leaves under an awning.

Gabriele declined food, saying he felt queasy and wanted to sleep, so Oliver and I ordered Chinese takeout and sat on schnapps couch, clumsily trying to glue leaves to turkeys.

We didn’t have the talk that I wasn’t sure Oliver even wanted to have, but we did talk. Oliver looked as though he had things he wanted to say, and I wasn’t about to deny him the chance to work through his feelings with a sympathetic sounding board. He wouldn’t find many others willing to be that.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he admitted, absentmindedly shredding a leaf and seemingly unaware that it was going to end up ground into the carpet whenever he stood up. “Go on with my life, I suppose. I didn't ever really talk to them that often. But I felt better about it when I felt like it was my choice.”

I didn’t have answers for him, and I didn’t think he wanted suggestions anyway. What he wanted, and what I could give him, was someone to listen.

So I listened, and in the process, I learned things about Oliver that I had never been privileged enough to know, or never thought to ask, back when I was so sure that we knew each other better than anyone even without speaking – how his father didn’t consider philosophy to be a masculine discipline; the disagreements he had had with his mother over his decision to move to New York and pursue academia; the slight sense of inferiority that comes with having an older sibling engaged to his high school girlfriend and poised to take over the family business.

Through all of that ran a through-line of the love he did hold for them, and the hurt he felt over their rejection, and I decided that, just for one night, I could be what he needed me to be. We were drunk, and he was sad, and when I had been drunk and alone on my birthday he had humored me. In the morning, I was sure we would be back to our tiresome stalemate, but for the moment, we could be something closer to what we once were.

My commitment to that belief was tested, however, when he spoke of his fiancée. Nancy. He had never spoken her name before, and I wished he hadn’t now. I had liked it when she was only a nebulous construction in my head, someone I had never met and now never needed to.

But hearing about her, it struck me that everything Oliver said about her sounded less like lovers and more like friends. She was getting a PhD in conducting from the Manhattan School of Music – so I wasn’t unique to him even in my passions, I thought; how humiliating – and the majority of their relationship seemed to have revolved around a mutual interest in each other’s fields of study.

They had been on-again, off-again, which I had known, but I now learned that even when they were off-again they had still celebrated holidays together, because they were alone in New York and they might as well. The tree was a holdover from Nancy, like I had thought.

It was when he began to reach the end of their relationship that I interrupted. It felt like something I ought to interrupt, regardless of whether I wanted to hear it. “Why are you telling me this?

Oliver looked at his knees, inches away from mine but still not touching. “Because I thought you should know.”

“Because you thought I should know, or because you wanted me to know?”

“Because you deserve to know.”

It didn’t escape me that I had echoed our exchange from the piazza back in Italy. But we had decided, only a few months ago, to be friends-now-maybe-something-else-later, and even if I wanted to help him through tonight, it wasn’t later _enough._ Not for me, and not for him, now that he was confused and reaching out for me just because I was familiar.

“We’re friends, Oliver,” I said, with what I hoped was the same gentle, firm reprimand he had given me on my birthday.

Oliver sighed, abandoning his turkey and sinking back into the welcoming embrace of schnapps couch. Better it than me. “I know that. I know. But just for tonight.”

He fell asleep that way, and I sat and watched him, tracing over the features I had never thought I would see again in sleep, so much younger and smoother than when he was awake. He held himself so still, so tense, and it was easy to forget, when that was all I saw of him, that he could be just as vulnerable as I was. That he had been just as afraid, or more afraid, of what was happening between us. That he was probably afraid now.

I didn’t remember falling asleep there, but when I woke, curled into Oliver’s side, one arm flung over his chest, I saw that his cheeks were shiny, like he had been crying. Surely not. But then I would have cried, in his position, and hadn’t I once thought to myself that we were the same? No matter how much I built him up in my head, at the end of the day he was human, possessed with all the human frailties I told myself he didn’t feel.

His hand had found its way into my hair sometime during the night and his neck was tilted at an angle that would play hell on his muscles in the morning, so I shook him, gently, until he stirred and his eyes fluttered blearily open. His fingers carded through my hair, for a moment, muscle memory from a time when waking up in each other’s arms was just how we did things.

“Elio?” he murmured, as if he didn’t know how we had gotten there. Which was understandable; I wasn’t sure how we had gotten to that point either. His hand fell away, and I was grateful for that.

“In the flesh.”

“Are you sure? It feels more like a dream.”

I laughed. He should come to my bed, I said, throwing self-preservation to the wind. It was more comfortable; his neck would thank me.

Oliver shook his head. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I know myself.”

_I know myself._ That echo of rejections past jolted me out of my half-asleep conviction that any of what was happening was a good idea. Of course. I had said I wanted us to be friends, and he had gone along with it. I had set that boundary, and now he was setting his.

And, truth be told, he looked so familiar there, rumpled and much younger than he was, that I knew I might be tempted to relax my own boundaries if he did join me in bed. So, as I watched his eyes drift shut again, I allowed myself to brush his hair back from his forehead, just once, before I left him there and tiptoed away to call my parents.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [petition for schnapps couch to get its own character arc](https://www.arokel.tumblr.com)


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Didn't intend to post this on Christmas eve, but uh, here we are? I realized it had been ages since I last posted, so Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it)
> 
> We have finally reached the "friends" stage of friends-to-lovers! Truly a momentous occasion. This chapter's a long one, but it's also a turning-point of sorts so I feel like that's okay.
> 
> **there's a brief, blink-and-you'll miss it joking reference to incest towards the end**

Peter’s family had extended their invitation for Christmas upstate again, since Izzy was headed back to California. But my parents were coming to visit me in Manhattan, I said, so I would have to decline this year. Peter said that we had to come up for at least a weekend, then; his parents were dying to meet mine.

Alright, I said, but only if Oliver could come too.

“What _happened_ between you two?”

I shrugged. “My parents love him. And I think he needs that right now.”

Oliver was a harder sell, but I held firm.

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” he said, referring to both my family and Peter’s.

“You wouldn’t be.”

Finally, after many assurances that my parents would be offended if he declined, Oliver gave in. “You guys have the _weirdest_ relationship,” Peter said, when I knocked on his door to confirm that Oliver would, in fact, be joining us.

My parents arrived just before the end of term – you couldn’t be picky when you booked flights on such short notice, my mother said – and insisted on taking all my friends out to dinner, since everyone was still in town.

Rebecca declared that it was nice of them, while Peter and Anna, as children of parents who loved to entertain, gave me sympathetic looks. I preferred sympathy to hero-worship from Anna, though I did have to resign myself to the likelihood that I would be hideously embarrassed in a nice restaurant in front of all of my friends.

But, since Daniel and Anna seemed like they would be able to control themselves around my father – Anna controlled herself around Oliver, after all, and he was a much more attractive prospect to a twenty-one-year-old college student than my father was – and I was in a charitable mood, I invited Laurie, from Oliver’s class, mostly because Clara had declined and the reservation had already been made for twelve.

It didn’t escape my notice, either, with the twelve of us all seated at one long table, that the only person missing was Oliver, and I felt his absence as keenly as if he were Judas Iscariot himself.

Then the semester ended and everyone scattered, bound for their respective homes and holiday plans. My parents came to see Peter, Gabriele, Jamie and I in the holiday choir concert, which I felt was even more embarrassing than the dinner had been but Jamie said was “pretty sweet, honestly.”

The final day of the term found the usual suspects lounging in my apartment for the last few hours before those of us leaving had to catch various forms of transportation. Rebecca, in a strange twist, was counseling Anna through her anxiety over meeting Daniel’s parents for the first time, but I couldn’t pay much attention because I was busy dealing with my own anxieties.

Because Oliver had been busy on the night my parents had taken the rest of my friends to dinner, and because he counted as a _family_ friend, they had invited him, along with Professor Chamberlain, to a smaller dinner with the three of us. That should have been fine; I had eaten enough meals with Oliver by that point that I was pretty good at it, I thought.

But I hadn’t eaten a meal with him since our post-takeout nap on schnapps couch, and I wasn’t sure whether he had guessed that this special invite was in part because I had pleaded with my parents over the phone that morning to include him in our holiday plans. I hoped he didn’t know.

Most importantly, though, I didn’t know what to wear.

“Oh my god, you’re going to be fine,” Daniel said exasperatedly, but he had evidently decided that dealing with my nerves was easier than dealing with his girlfriend’s, so he stayed put on the floor and watched me pace without complaint.

Finally, Peter unzipped his suitcase, grabbed a shirt at random, and tossed it to me with a “for fuck’s sake, just put this on. It looks better on you anyway.”

“It does,” Izzy agreed. Peter looked wounded.

I frowned down at it. It was a shirt that I had worn exactly once, early in our friendship, before Peter had declared that it was too nice and I would probably ruin it with my complete disregard for properly hanging up clothing. “But this is your favorite shirt.”

“And you can give it back when you visit me in January,” Peter said.

It was said casually, but I knew that Peter valued his clothing, and this shirt in particular, and that only something important would override his usual protective sartorial instincts. Since a routine dinner with my parents didn’t seem nearly enough to warrant that, I wasn’t sure why, exactly, he had given it to me.

But I supposed that maybe he just didn’t know how else to help. He had been absent on Thanksgiving, and maybe he felt like he had let me down, somehow, by not being there. Or that I had shut him out, intentionally or unintentionally, by not telling him about my conversation with Oliver until Rosh Hashanah. Peter had said to me that he was at a loss for how to best be there for me; maybe this shirt was his silent way of saying that again.

It was only that Peter had Izzy, now, and Oliver and I really were in a better place after our talk – our come-to-Jesus, as Peter was fond of calling it. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that he would feel like I had spurned his help, because I didn’t think I needed help.

Perhaps the two of us needed to sit down and hash out our relationship, as well. Brothers could drift apart just as well as friends.

So I took the shirt for the overture I thought it was, and, because I didn’t know how else to say thank you with so many other people in the room, stripped off my own to change. Anna averted her eyes, which was sweet, if unnecessary; I had spent enough time half-dressed around girls during summers at the Villa that I didn’t put much stock in modesty.

Nor did my parents, it seemed, as I pulled my head through the shirt only to find them having appeared in the doorway in the few seconds my vision had been blocked.

“You don’t have to dress up, dear; it’s only us and Oliver,” my mother said.

The room – all six of us, since Rebecca, the only person who still didn’t know the truth about me and Oliver, had left already – fell into an awkward silence. “Well, clothes make the man,” Peter said, with a strained laugh and a glance to me that screamed _how much can I say._ I looked helplessly back at him.

Anna and Daniel left quickly after that – _oh gosh, look at the time, we really should be going, nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Perlman, huge fans, tell Professor Katz we say hi_ – and Izzy followed hard on their heels, offering to split a cab to the airport with Gabriele.

“Yeah, sure,” Gabriele said. “Elio, come to my room and help me with my bag.”

I trailed Gabriele to his room, though I was sure he could handle his bag by himself. I was correct, because once there, he turned on me, hands in his pockets in a studied indifference. I waited for whatever was to come.

“You’re doing a nice thing for Oliver.”

I hadn’t expected that.

My motivations were not particularly opaque, I supposed, to people like Gabriele and Peter, who knew me so well. I just didn’t know where Oliver fell on that spectrum.

Gabriele turned away to hoist his duffel bag over his shoulder, which gave me the space I needed to say, “we didn’t sleep together, you know.”

“I think you would both be happier if you did.”

Izzy hugged me goodbye with a whispered _knock ‘em dead, tiger,_ and Gabriele promised to give my father’s regards to an old friend who lived near his parents’ vineyard. In lieu of a hug, Gabriele paused on his way out the door to put me in a half-hearted headlock and said, louder than I thought was strictly necessary, “wish your _allettante Americano_ a happy Hannukah from me.”

My father raised his eyebrows.

And then it was just me wearing Peter’s shirt and Peter zipping up his suitcase and my parents pretending not to watch us.

“Izzy’s right, you know,” Peter said. “You do look confident.”

“I don’t feel it.”

Peter grinned, punching me on the shoulder and straightening my collar. “That’s what the shirt is for.” Then, quietly, so that my parents couldn’t hear, he added, “if he’s not coming, just call and let me know, okay? I haven’t told my parents, so my mom won’t be disappointed.”

Peter’s mother was very different from mine, if she could adapt so quickly to an added houseguest the way Peter seemed confident she could.

But it was fine; we were friends. We had crossed a hurdle sometime during the night on Thanksgiving, and just because I was nervous to get dinner with him and my parents didn’t mean I couldn’t handle a few days in close proximity with him.

“And sometimes friends don’t want to share an air mattress surrounded by The Pet Shop Boys. But if you’re sure.”

I was.

Peter seemed unconvinced, though he relented enough to say that he would assume Oliver was coming unless I said otherwise, but that “if you have sex with him in my childhood bedroom, I will disown you.”

I would never have sex in Peter’s childhood bedroom without Peter’s consent, I assured him. Well, that was alright in his book, then, so long as I asked for his blessing.

I knew, somehow, that if I _did_ ask, Peter would give it.

Then he was gone, too, and I had no option left but to turn and face my parents for the first time in nearly a year and a half. I had no idea what they would say, or what _I_ should say – I had been woefully remiss in writing, and evasively brief in our phone calls. What did they think of my friends? What did they think of me?

“You’re very lucky, Elio,” my father said.

I sagged, partly with relief that they approved of my friends and partly with the knowledge that to my parents, I _was_ still just the stupid kid who’d gotten his heart broken because he was incautious and indiscreet. I was indescribably lucky to have found even five people so kind and accepting, and I knew that, and I would never take it for granted. Especially not after seeing how alone I _could_ have ended up, like Oliver nearly had.

I smiled, in the hopes that if I treated it like a private joke, it might become one. “So I’m told.”

And then my father smiled back and said, “I always said you would find your people, if you just put yourself out there and looked for them,” and suddenly I didn’t know why I’d avoided their calls for so long.

“I’m really glad you came.”

“We’re glad you asked us.”

My nerves were still there, but seeing my parents again and knowing that I still had their support had done a lot to calm them. Still, it took me all through the cab ride to the restaurant to get up the courage to tell them the truth. I halted just inside the door, unsure of how to say what I wanted to say. “The reason I asked you to come –“

“We know, Elio,” my mother said, touching my cheek so gently I thought I might cry – not because I was sad, but because I didn’t understand how she could put so much love into such a small touch, when we had been apart for so long. I didn’t understand how two people could slot back into each other’s lives and hearts so easily as we had, and I didn’t know how to replicate it.

“He told me I was so lucky to have you, and I just thought I could – but don’t tell him, okay? I don’t want to think I’m pitying him, or…”

Or what? I didn’t know. That this overture meant more than one concerned friend giving what comfort he could in a comfortless situation?

I felt like Peter must have, going out on a limb because he couldn’t think of any way to help me aside from kissing me, trying to put himself in my shoes and failing. I didn’t pity Oliver; I ached because he was hurting, and I didn’t know how to fix it. If we weren’t _normal friends,_ if we were something closer to what we had been when he had first confessed his fears to me, maybe this gesture would have been appropriate, but as we were, it was too grand to make outright. He couldn’t know.

“Of course not,” my mother assured me, but my father said, “are we here because he’s our friend, or because…”

“Because he deserves to have a good holiday,” I said firmly. “I don’t enter into it.”

I almost believed it, too.

I ignored the way both my mother and father looked a little disappointed at that and led the way to our table, which wasn’t hard to spot given that even seated Oliver was head and shoulders above most of the other diners. He rose as we approached to greet my parents with perfectly-executed cheek kisses, then indicated for me to sit beside him as they greeted Professor Chamberlain.

“That’s a nice shirt,” Oliver murmured to me as I sat down. “Is it a loan, or did someone finally murder Peter?”

I ignored the way Oliver’s compliment made my cheeks heat; I had just come into the warmth of the restaurant and it was the body’s natural response to such a drastic change in temperature. Or at least I hoped Oliver would see it that way. He hadn’t even complimented _me,_ anyway; he had complimented Peter’s fashion sense.

“You can’t get out of coming with us that easily,” I said, light, teasing, to cover for it. I could see yet another _if you don’t want me there_ on Oliver’s lips, but a fancy restaurant with my parents was not the place to have that debate, so I cut him off with, “we’ll probably hate each other by the end of it, but that’s what family vacations are for, right?”

Oliver’s face warred between several potential arch responses – I saw a _I didn’t realized you’d ever stopped hating me_ and a _so we’re family now?_ – before just shaking his head and smiling at me in resigned exasperation. “Someday I’ll be able to say no to you,” he said, and his sincerity knocked me to the ground much more effectively than any sarcasm could have.

Then my father said “so, Oliver, tell us why Elio’s friends call you _il allettante Americano,”_ and reality came crashing in between us as our quiet, private bubble burst and Oliver turned that resigned laughter on the rest of the table instead and I was left to spin out about his statement on my own.

“Elio tells me the girls in the department call you hot professor, but this I haven’t heard before,” Professor Chamberlain said with interest, and I listened numbly as Oliver confessed he feared he might lose his job if he told the story but told it anyway.

I had thought we could only be so honest with each other when drunk. But if Oliver could say it sober, in the middle of a dinner, as if it meant nothing, then it was possible he felt that longing and that sincerity all the time, and what was more, that he didn’t care if I knew he felt it. That was not like the Oliver I had known, the Oliver whose moods were so opaque I had needed to develop a color-coding system to anticipate them. What sort of bridge had I accidentally shoved us over by simply sitting there and listening to him when he needed me?

“Well, I suppose they’re not _your_ students,” Professor Chamberlain said, dubiously, jolting me out of it. I had lost the thread of things, but I was able to pick it up quickly enough when my father, after telling her to _lighten up, Kathleen, they’re young,_ flagged down a waiter to order a _siren on the rocks_ – a blueberry martini, neat.

It made more sense in the original Italian, Oliver offered, as the baffled waiter promised to see what she could do.

My father explained that he had been a fan of blueberry martinis in university, which sounded absolutely disgusting to me, and I was in the middle of making a face to convey that sentiment when Oliver said, “Elio would add peach schnapps to that” and all of my willpower was suddenly rerouted towards trying not to choke on my ice water.

That was the weirdest part of it, I mused, mopping at my chin with my napkin as Oliver smirked at me: that as much as Oliver got along well with my friends, he got along even better with my family. I hadn’t even needed to ask my parents to be friendly to him; they adored Oliver, and somehow, they had maintained their relationship with him even while mine had faltered.

And, contrary to my fears earlier in the day, Oliver’s ease with my parents and with Professor Chamberlain seemed to smooth out the rough patches between us, too, until it was like we had never been on rocky ground at all. Every awkward moment between us in the past two years was vanished.

I couldn’t tell whether Oliver was just acting for my sake, or for my parents’ sake, but I did know that _this_ was what I had been wanting, when I had made the decision for us to be _just friends._ If we could have this all the time, around other people or just between the two of us, then I could lust after him in peace and not wonder too much about what might have been.

And, seeing how Oliver lit up when he spoke to my father about his latest research or how earnestly he asked after Mafalda and Anchise and Vimini, I knew that I couldn’t risk taking this away from Oliver, just because I was bad at making up my mind and keeping it.

Oliver invited us over to his apartment the following evening for the first night of Hanukkah, which I tried to pretend was not a big deal to me, even though it was.

The apartment itself, however, was small, and decorated in a taste clearly not Oliver’s – deep reds and dark woods, giving it a sort of claustrophobic feel – and I understood now why he spent so much time in his office, if this was what he came home to.

Paul was an older dog – a rescue, Oliver said, because he hadn’t known what to do with himself after the breakup and having someone else in the apartment had seemed like a good idea. He had come with the name, and at his age it hadn’t seemed worth the trouble to teach him a new one, so the Apollonius moniker was really just for fun.

I had declined Oliver’s offer to bring a chair in from the kitchen, so I sat on the floor with my back against the loveseat and Paul’s head in my lap as we watched the candle burn down in comfortable chit-chat, and thought that _this_ was how it should have gone, two years ago.

And I thought maybe we could pick up from here where we had left off there, if I gave the word. But I wasn’t as brave as Oliver thought I was.

My parents headed back to their hotel not long after, but I declined their offer to split a cab. I was a real New Yorker now, I told them; I preferred the subway. My mother pursed her lips.

But then, when the door had shut behind them and Oliver and I were left facing each other in his cramped living room, Paul between us, all of the ease I had felt only moments before seemed to dissipate. Instead, there was a new sort of tension between us, something much more expectant than wary, hushed rather than strained.

“I know what you’re doing,” Oliver said, quietly. I kept my head down and scratched Paul around the ears rather than look up at him or respond. “I don’t need to be taken care of.”

So. He did know. I supposed it must have seemed suspicious to him that, after eighteen months of minimal contact with my parents, I had invited them to New York for Christmas, seemingly on a whim, right after his admission that he’d been all but disowned by his.

Still, I tried to play it off. I hadn’t asked my parents to care about him; they thought of him like a son whether he liked it or not. He was part of the family.

“I thought you didn’t want me to be.”

And sure, I hadn’t, but Oliver had to have known that had changed. How could he think, after I had sat with him until he fell asleep on my couch, after I had flown my parents out to New York just for his sake, that I didn’t want him in my life?

I laughed, lifting my eyes from Paul’s doe-eyed gaze to finally meet Oliver’s. “What, I’m not allowed to change my mind?”

“Plenty of people fall out with their families,” Oliver said gently, like I was the one who needed comforting. “You don’t have to treat me like I’m fragile.”

 _I don’t want you to think I’m fragile,_ I translated.

He wasn’t; of course he wasn’t. Oliver was much stronger than I was. But he was precious to me, something worth protecting and worrying over, even if I didn’t know how to say it.

“This is nice, though, right?”

Yeah. This was nice.

The silence stretched between us again, this time the silence of two people who have decided not to continue one line of conversation without thinking of another in advance.

“You made a peach joke,” I said, trying for something light, anything to rescue us from the too-sincere heaviness of our exchange so far. “Last night, at dinner.”

Oliver graciously accepted the attempt. “I figured if I joke about it, maybe I’ll want it less.”

“Oliver –“ I started, though I had no idea how I would have finished it. We were not at a place where he could just _say_ those sorts of things, even if I had fallen asleep half-atop him and even if in my mind _normal friends_ might be a precursor to _more than friends_. I needed him to know that I wasn’t ready, and that being rushed only made me balk.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” he said, accurately reading what I couldn’t say. His smile, when he turned it on me, was as baleful and pleading as Paul’s. “Tonight was nice.”

_And let’s not ruin that._

That wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Oliver and I were only dangerous alone together; around other people we managed _normal friends_ with a surprising ease. I was nearly giddy with the experience of having inside jokes with him, things that he could say or stories that he could tell and I would rush to cut him off because I wasn’t _thrilled_ with the idea of my parents knowing how many of my nights, on average, per week, I spent in bars. And I liked it when Oliver talked over me and told them anyway, because that meant we had secrets that _weren’t_ shameful.

I didn’t call Peter, so, three days before we were to arrive at his home, Peter called me.

“I have to give my mom at least three days’ notice, so once I tell her he’s coming you can’t change your mind.”

I wasn’t going to change my mind. We were good. We were friends. We had had a minor bump in the road when I had unadvisedly brought up the peach joke, but we were friends and we were handling it, and we would continue to handle it at Peter’s house.

Taking the train upstate with Oliver was surreal, because in my mind, the combination of train-plus-Oliver meant _goodbye._ I thought he might have sensed my unease, because he didn’t comment on my endless stream of nervous chatter, which I couldn’t help because some childish, irrational part of my brain, the part that still slept with a night light, said that if I was talking to him, he couldn’t disappear.

We sat across from each other as I prepared him for what to expect – mostly the inevitability of Liv’s soon-to-develop crush on him – our knees brushing because he was too big for the seats. I knew we would most likely be sharing a room, since my parents would be sleeping in the guest room, and touching knees with him brought back memories of the last time we had shared a room when I had thought that such a small piece of contact was the biggest hurdle I could ever have crossed with him.

How much closer we were now, and how much further apart.

Peter accosted me at the foot of the driveway, drawing me aside with a hand on my elbow as Oliver and my parents made polite introductions at the front door with Peter’s parents and a predictably-starstruck Liv. “Okay, so, don’t be mad, but turns out my mom needed more than three days.”

I could have told him that.

My assumption that Oliver and I would be bunking together had been prophetic, but what I had _not_ anticipated was that we would, in fact, be sleeping together, since while Peter’s family _did_ own two air mattresses, one of them had developed a leak and was out of commission.

“I thought you were joking,” I hissed, as we made our way into the foyer, now significantly behind the rest of the group.

“I _was._ This is what you get for not pulling out.”

What, like this was my fault? “ _You’re_ the one who thought I was going to pull out; I told you I wasn’t going to.”

I knew I was irrationally upset at Peter for a situation out of his control, but I felt even less in control and I didn’t know how to deal with that. A holiday with Oliver I could handle, but sleeping in the same small bed with him? That was too much for my nerves.

And I felt guilty, because Oliver had made it very clear to me on Thanksgiving that it was too much for his nerves, too, or at the least for his self-control. I had let my reluctance to push back against Peter’s mother-hen worrying put us both into this unfortunate situation, and I would have to be the one to break it to Oliver.

Oliver, who at that moment appeared at my other elbow with a drawled, “is there something I should know about you two?”

Peter dropped my arm guiltily.

It was fine, Oliver said; we were both adults, we could roll with the punches. We could share an air mattress. Of course we could, Peter’s mom said; Americans had such odd ideas about touch but here no one would bat an eye. My mother blinked rapidly, several times, in what I knew to be a sign that she was trying not to laugh, which my father then had to play off as a joke.

Peter tried again that night to salvage the situation; for my benefit, I knew, but I had resigned myself to my fate and so his attempts to save me from it were more irritating than welcome. Oliver was so tall, he said; he would be more comfortable in Peter’s bed by himself.

“I’m never comfortable in bed,” Oliver said. I knew that to be untrue, but I kept it to myself. It seemed Oliver, too, had steeled himself and adapted to our new, farcical reality.

Okay, well, Peter said, I had slept in his bed a few times the previous year, when we had stumbled home too drunk to figure out whose was whose. It was no hardship, really, to share with me.

“We’ll be fine, Pete.”

I wasn’t sure I believed it even as I said it.

Peter’s bedroom was too dark, with its blackout curtains and its looming posters. I had forgotten how poorly I’d slept the previous year. This was compounded, of course, by the fact that Oliver and I were sandwiched onto an air mattress that didn’t seem to adhere to any standard bed sizes, because surely no queen mattress was this narrow.

“No nightlight?” Oliver murmured, and it probably wasn’t _intentionally_ in my ear; it was just that there was nowhere else for his mouth to be. “Look at you, growing up.”

“This is Peter’s bedroom,” I pointed out, stupidly. I didn’t know what it meant that he now made jokes about my age, when two years ago he had done his absolute best to forget about it. I didn’t know what I wanted it to mean.

Oliver huffed a quiet laugh, shifting onto his side to face away from me. Unfortunately, the mattress dipped with the move and he was forced to grope behind him for my arm to keep himself from sliding off it.

“At least I wasn’t being watched over by The Pet Shop Boys in my sleep in yours,” he said, settling himself instead into what it seemed would prove the only viable position, which was facing me. Privately, I thought the watchful eyes of the many leather-clad men surrounding us might be a good thing.

Peter groaned into his pillow. “You can flirt if you want, but keep me out of it.”

No sex in Peter’s childhood bedroom without his involvement; don’t worry, I remembered.

“Oh my _god_ ,” Peter said, flinging himself towards the wall and away from me.

I meant to keep a distance between myself and Oliver, but Oliver simply took up too much space in a bed for that. Or that was what I told myself when I woke up the next morning with Oliver curled around me, arm draped over my chest, our legs tangled, and his hard cock pressed against the backs of my thighs.

Immediately, my body decided that _flight_ was the only viable option in this scenario. We had both set boundaries, and though we had crossed a number of them the night before out of necessity, _this_ was not something I could handle. Not without talking, and certainly not watched over by the many iterations of a boy band I didn’t even like. I had to leave, before Oliver woke up and this hideously awkward situation became even more so.

But Oliver was already awake, and as I tensed to get up without disturbing him, his arm tightened around me. “Ignore it.”

I ignored _him_ , because staying where I was was clearly the worst possible way to handle things.

“Please. Ignore it. I’ve been tossing and turning all night and I just want to sleep a little longer, if I can.”

But I kept struggling, and rather than keep me there by force he let me slip out of his hold and flee to the safety of the kitchen and its occupants – namely Peter, who raised his eyebrows at me in a silent _holy shit_ that told me he had seen, and correctly interpreted, the position I had woken up in.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I muttered, accepting his sympathetic wince alongside the coffee he pressed into my hands. I sagged against the kitchen island beside him, even though it made my already-stiff back ache in protest at being so abused, both by the air mattress and my terrible posture.

Peter declared that I was no fun and that if I didn’t want him to laugh at my misfortune I shouldn’t make such adorable pouty faces, but he shut up very quickly as he caught Oliver descending the stairs, running a sleep-clumsy hand through his hair. The motion lifted the hem of the flimsy t-shirt he had worn to bed, and it would have taken more willpower than I possessed to keep my eyes from straying to the brief glimpse of his abdomen it revealed.

“Dude,” Peter whispered to me, and a quick glance to my left showed him looking almost blindsided. “You saw him shirtless every day and it took you _three weeks_ to hit that? He’s like a Greek statue. Except that Greek statues have small –“

“I _will_ murder you.”

Oliver _did_ look tired, and I felt bad for running out on him when he had clearly found the only comfortable position he could, but there was no way in hell I could have stayed there, just the two of us in Peter’s room with no Peter to act as a beleaguered chaperone. And we had come downstairs later than anyone else, anyway; I really hadn’t cut short his sleep by much.

But despite the circles under his eyes and his frequent yawns, Oliver listened attentively to the conversation at breakfast and fielded Liv’s barrage of questions with admirable patience, so clearly I hadn’t put him out too much.

My parents and Peter’s were getting on like a house on fire and Peter had been conscripted into some sort of incomprehensible game of make-believe with Cecile and Julien, so, to make up for abandoning him earlier, I inserted myself into the conversation, doing my best to turn it in the driest, most impenetrably academic direction I could. Oliver took up the cause with visible relief, and soon enough Liv grew bored of shop talk she couldn’t follow and wandered off.

“I thought you were done playing audience plant,” Oliver said to me, as we escaped out the back door and into the snow. Even with the layers I had remembered to wear this time, it was still bitingly cold, and I saw Oliver smirk when I shivered. But he didn’t offer to put his arm around me as he had on Thanksgiving, so perhaps my flight from the air mattress had made him wary of touching me at all. An unintended and unwelcome consequence.

“Maybe I hoped I’d get someone’s number out of it again.”

Oliver looked at me, startled, then realized I was teasing him and tilted his chin up to the sky, shaking his head and huffing a small, resigned laugh. “I can’t believe she did that.”

I shrugged. I could, after having spent an afternoon with her. Laurie was the kind of person who, once she had set her sights on something, did not hesitate in achieving it. I admired that about her. If I were a more proactive person, I might have even tried to channel some of her go-getter spirit in my own life.

We wandered into the ravine by unspoken agreement. I stumbled and skidded for a few seconds on the way down before Oliver caught me by the elbow to steady me, and then we stood awkwardly for a few minutes, unsure of where to go from there.

The trees around us looked familiar, and for a moment I couldn’t place why. Then it hit me, and the parallel was so ridiculous that I had to step away from him and turn away to hide my laughter, because it seemed rude to laugh about him to his face.

He followed, coming to rest beside me. “What’s funny?”

I shook my head, breathless. This was the exact spot where, just over a year ago, Peter had kissed me in an attempt to tell me that whatever happened with Oliver, Peter would stand by me for it. And now here we were: friends again, or something like it, with Peter’s permission to flirt but go no further than that in the shared bed he had accidentally doomed us to.

But Oliver had not been privy to my endless agonizing over our back-and-forth, start-stop relationship over the past year, so he would probably just find it sad. Better to leave out all my musings on parallels. “Peter kissed me here, last year.”

If I had expected jealousy from Oliver, I didn’t get it. Instead, he blinked in what looked like complete bafflement and simply asked me why. I supposed seeing us interact now and hearing Peter tease me must have put the final nail in Oliver’s suspicions about the two of us.

“To see if I felt anything.”

“And did you?”

“It was like kissing my brother.”

Oliver laughed at that, kicking up snow as we walked and turning that teasing smile on me which I had seen so rarely even when I had deserved it. He almost _reminded_ me of Peter, in that moment, open and cheerful and no doubt ready to say something scandalizing just to embarrass me. “Am I like kissing your brother?”

I felt my face go red, but being friends with Peter had inoculated me against the sort of tongue-tied embarrassment that would have prevented me from responding, the way it would have if Oliver had said it a year ago, and allowed me instead to parry with, “I hope you don’t kiss your brother like you kiss me.”

Oliver had clearly not been expecting to be teased in return, because his step faltered for a second and his breath stuttered. I realized, too late, that I had said _kiss_ in the present tense. Not _kissed_ as in _we used to do this and now we’ve moved on_ , but _kiss_ as in _this might happen again someday._ I might have been confused by the signals Oliver sent me, but I was giving as good as I got.

“I’m trying so hard to be good,” he said, a quiet confession.

 _Me too,_ I wanted to say, but that wasn’t fair. We were stuck at _normal friends_ because I had frozen us there, and it wouldn’t be fair to Oliver to admit I might want to be more and then say we still couldn’t do anything about it. Put up or shut up, Daniel would say. _Kissed_ or _kiss_ , it didn’t matter. I had made up my mind, for once in my life, and until I changed it I wouldn’t give any indication that I could.

Oliver looked at his feet, sinking into the mossy covering of the ravine floor where the snow hadn’t reached. “Would it be so terrible?”

“I can’t lose you again.”

He had said as much to me, in his office right after I had admitted Peter and I had never been together, so I knew he would understand. And even if it didn’t encompass all of my feelings towards him, it was honest enough that he would hear it for the truth it was, and that had to be worth something.

Oliver nodded, slowly, then faster as if he was convincing himself. I envied him; I wasn’t convinced. But we let the subject lie.

The next morning, I woke once again to Oliver’s arms around me, Oliver’s nose buried in the crook of my neck, and Oliver’s cock heavy against my thighs. This time, I extricated myself without waking him, and only shook my head at Peter’s concerned look before heading downstairs.

In the kitchen, I met my mother, who had never been able to sleep late in new places. Was I sleeping alright on the air mattress, she wanted to know; that sort of thing could be so hard on the back.

It was okay, I told her, if a bit cramped with Oliver there as well.

I saw something very sad in her eyes for just a second before she said, “Elio, you know that whatever happens between you and Oliver, he’s still part of the family, right? You don’t have to do anything because you think it’s what’s best for us.”

I knew that. But it wasn’t my parents losing Oliver I feared. I knew that they would keep in touch, even if Oliver and I split so explosively as to be truly irreparable this time. It was me who couldn’t afford that.

“It doesn’t hurt any less, mama. It’s been two years, and it doesn’t hurt any less.”

My mother pulled me into her arms, and for a moment it was as if we were back in our own kitchen in our house in Milan, familiar and safe, not a strange kitchen in a house that had felt so much like home to me the year before but now held a jangling, uneasy air that made me long for the simplicity of holidays at home in Italy. I vowed not to let myself go so long without her again.

On the last morning of our trip, when I woke up to Oliver spooning me, I let myself indulge in what I thought might be the last time we would ever wake up like this and turned in the circle of his arms to hug him back.

“I’m being good, I promise,” I murmured, when Oliver shifted in surprise. “I just miss your hugs.”

Oliver tactfully didn’t mention that I was hard, too.

“When I first figured it out, I couldn’t stomach the idea of you with another guy,” Peter said to me over morning coffee, watching Oliver roughhouse with Julien. “Or, I guess I was okay with the idea, but picturing it, you know? But seeing you guys this morning… you’re a pretty cute couple.”

“If you think that’s what two men sleeping together looks like –“

“He’s not over you,” Peter said, stopping my facetious redirection in its tracks. “I think he gets less over you every day.”

I knew he was right. I just didn’t know what to do about it.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ten chapters in and you're finally meeting the last major character I'll ever introduce you to; truly an achievement.
> 
> I feel like maybe not a lot happens here? I can't really tell. But it's mostly because shit goes DOWN in the next two chapters and we've just gotta get some stuff out of the way first.

Winter in New York was miserable yet again, though there was a divide in opinion. Peter, Anna, Daniel and Rebecca, having grown up on the east coast, thought that Izzy, Gabriele and I were wimps. Anna liked to make winery and chateau jokes, which she said she was allowed to make because her parents were millionaires. Oliver simply shrugged and said, “I’m from Vermont. This is nothing.”

Though I had nearly forgotten about him during my confusing, whirlwind of a reconciliation with Oliver, Jamie reentered my life in January with customary charm and flair, asking if I would assist him with a composition for voice and piano he wanted to submit for a student performance.

The _voice_ part of the composition was supplied by Julia, James’ best friend from high school. I had seen her before, since, as an opera student, she had performed a few of Rodney’s arias, but this was our first official meeting. She was taller in person than she looked from the stage, which I thought was a nice change after being friends with so many short women. I was a little intimidated by her – not because of her height, though Jamie seemed to take it as a personal offence that she was taller than him, but because she was equally as cool and confident as he was, and so much charisma in one small practice room made me tongue-tied.

On the bright side, however, I was fairly confident that they were dating, which solved the problem of my feelings regarding Jamie for me. If he was dating Julia, I didn’t have to think about it.

I didn’t want to think about my feelings regarding Oliver, either, so, for lack of any better ideas, in early February I took Laurie up on her offer of a second date. It became clear fairly early in the night that nothing had changed, but I followed her back to her dorm anyway once the meal had wound to a close. That proved to have been the right choice, because without the pressure of a romantic setting, we spent the next four hours talking about music, philosophy, architecture – anywhere our interests aligned, which was frequent.

Laurie introduced me to Aeschylus, the hamster she and her roommate had successfully snuck in past the RA, which prompted me to tell her about Paul and his grandiose nickname. She was interested to know more about Oliver, as every one of my female friends save Rebecca seemed to be, and, since I still hadn’t entirely forgiven him for his stunt with the Socratic seminar, I regaled her with as many embarrassing stories about Oliver that I could think of without incriminating myself.

Towards the end of the night the discussion turned to poetry, and I admitted that I knew very little about twentieth-century literature. When I finally left the dorm, close to midnight, it was with Laurie’s copy of Walt Whitman’s _Leaves of Grass_ tucked under my arm and a promise to call her and hang out again sometime.

“I expressly told you to only call me once you were over it,” she said, “but I’ll forgive you because this was a lot of fun anyway.”

My route off campus and towards the 116th street station took me past Hamilton, and out of curiosity, I circled around the back of the building. Despite the late hour, a light shone in Oliver’s office window.

I had no way in to the building so late at night, but I did have a number of pebbles at my feet and decent aim. I felt a little bit like a character in a teen movie, but I had never thrown rocks at someone’s window to get their attention before, and throwing snowballs at Peter’s had worked, so I figured I might as well try it.

Oliver greeted me at the main doors with a perplexed smile, a tad disgruntled at having been disturbed by some hooligan throwing rocks at him. That was fair. He asked what I was doing there so late, and, without really thinking about my answer, I told him that I had been on a date.

It was nothing but the truth, but it felt cruel coming so soon on the heels of Oliver’s tacit admission that he still had feelings for me, and Oliver’s briefly crestfallen expression, hidden just a moment too late, urged me to say, “It was Laurie. I don’t think we’re going to do it again.”

“Is that where you got the book?”

I looked at _Leaves of Grass_ tucked beneath my arm. Yes, it was; why?

Oliver, ever mercurial and inscrutable, started to laugh. “You went on a date that didn’t work out and she gave you Whitman?”

Yes, she had, but I still didn’t understand what was funny. Read it and you’ll see, he said.

I could make no response to that beyond promising to read it, so I gave the book an awkward, half-hearted pat and asked if Oliver always worked so late on Friday nights. God no, he said; Paul would be furious with him – not to mention the boy next door who walked him in the afternoons. He’d lost track of time; he ought to thank me for snapping him out of it.

Walk with me to the subway, he said.

That felt dangerous, so shortly after a second failed attempt with Laurie, and with my new understanding of where we stood – or where Oliver wanted us to stand. But we were headed in the same direction anyway and it wasn’t as if I had any readily available and believable excuses, so I hovered as Oliver locked up the building and told him the relevant parts of my night with Laurie.

“You do this to torture me, don’t you,” he said, interrupting my recounting of each personally embarrassing Oliver anecdote I had told her. The snowpack along the curb narrowed the sidewalk and forced us to walk much closer to each other than normal, and our gloved hands kept brushing with every step. It would have meant less jostling to just give in and hold hands, but that was a line I couldn’t cross.

“This is payback,” I informed him.

“ _Hot professor_ wasn’t payback enough?”

“That one’s just the truth.”

Oliver stopped, his elbow knocking painfully against mine even through our puffy coats, and for a moment I thought I had crossed it anyway with my poor taste in jokes. Luckily, however, Oliver didn’t seem to have heard me; he had stopped instead to let another couple pass by us on the narrow sidewalk. As they edged past, it became clear that they had just come out of the subway station – and, more importantly, that the reason they had left was that there was a mechanical issue with the track and the one train was not running.

I cursed under my breath and fumbled within my pockets for my wallet, resigned to spending a fortune on a cab at one in the morning, but beside me, Oliver was quiet.

“Stay with me,” he said. “No sense in paying for a cab when my apartment is right here.”

I hesitated. I didn’t try to hide it; his request was charged enough that it would have seemed strange if I _hadn’t_ hesitated, I thought. No need to spare his feelings on this one.

I had also hesitated because I half-expected him to back down immediately, and I didn’t want to make myself look like a fool by agreeing just in time for him to rescind the invitation. But Oliver, on seeing my hesitation, _doubled_ down instead. “Do your roommates expect you home tonight?”

“They wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t.” They would, probably. Peter had rolled his eyes when I had told him about my date and Gabriele had told me to say hi to Oliver while I was in the area, so I couldn’t honestly say that either of them had very high hopes for my sexual prospects. But telling Oliver that seemed pathetic, so I allowed myself a small white lie.

Unfortunately, as I always seemed to when it came to lying to Oliver, I had misjudged its emotional magnitude. I watched Oliver’s face fall in the light of the streetlamp above us, an expression of something like pain, and thought that it wasn’t fair of him to be so openly hurt by it. How was I supposed to be his friend like this, when I had built a relationship with him around deciphering his slightest grimace? This transparency was like sensory overload, leaving me reeling every time I saw it.

And yet he never pushed it, never spoke of it. “They don’t have to know it was me you spent the night with.”

The night had never been destined to end in sex. I had known it when I left my apartment, and I had known it when I followed Laurie back to her dorm, even as she informed me her roommate was out for the night. And it wasn’t going to end in sex now, with Oliver, but even so the obvious connotations of the phrase _spent the night with_ filled my mind and left me temporarily speechless.

When I did speak, it came out oddly chiding, as one or the other of us always seemed to slip into when reminding each other of what we were. “I don’t hide that we’re friends.”

“But they worry about you.”

It was an unspoken admission that my spending the night _could_ be worrying. That without the watchful eyes of The Pet Shop Boys above us, things might progress further than they had the final morning of our stay at Peter’s house with Peter safely asleep, when I had been brave enough to hug Oliver back.

I could take care of myself.

Oliver looked unconvinced by that. But he said, “stay with me, then. I insist.”

I didn’t say yes, but I did start us walking again, which I supposed was enough of an acquiescence. I let him pull ahead after a few seconds; it felt presumptuous to lead the way to his apartment, even if I did know where it was.

After a brief stop-off at the apartment next door, where we were met by Oliver’s dog-watcher’s irate mother and an ecstatically relieved Paul, we made it into Oliver’s tiny apartment. And then neither of us had anything to say to each other. Oliver busied himself with putting blankets and pillows on the loveseat, apologizing yet again for how small it was, and managed not to look me in the eye for the duration of the task.

“It’s fine. That’s about how much space you leave in a bed, anyway.”

Oliver halted, pillow scrunched beneath his hands. “If you’d rather –“

No. I wanted to be able to honestly say I had slept on his couch in the morning.

I asked if Oliver had a spare toothbrush, to which he nodded and abandoned the poor abused pillow to search for it beneath the bathroom sink. When he did, though, he just stared down at it in his hand for several seconds while I watched his face go through a fascinating series of emotions which all seemed to have chagrin as their base component.

“Oh. This was Nancy’s.”

The mention of her name sent a chill through the small bathroom, like a bucket of cold water thrown over the odd, expectant tension hovering between us. He couldn’t have more effectively doused any possibility of something unadvised happening that night if he had done it on purpose.

Someone had recently been murdered at the nearest bodega and it was cordoned off by police tape, he said, so – “here. Just use mine; I haven’t got anything contagious.”

That seemed incredibly unsanitary, but I was too rattled and off-kilter to argue. So I used Oliver’s toothbrush and Oliver used Nancy’s, and Oliver supplied me with an old t-shirt of his to wear to sleep, and by the time the while ordeal was over I was honestly glad to bid him goodnight and retreat to the cramped loveseat in peace.

But despite my commitment to propriety and my best efforts to ignore Paul snuffling from his dog bed in the corner, the loveseat was _very_ small and not very comfortable. So, finally, at around three in the morning, I gave in and knocked on Oliver’s door in defeat.

I opened it at his sleepy _come in,_ prepared to apologize and say I would take a cab home after all, when Oliver sighed in what I hoped was resignation and said, “come here, then.”

I didn’t know why I hadn’t expected that.

“At least I can say I tried to sleep on your couch,” I said, hoping I sounded equally resigned. I should have stuck to my guns about the cab, but the lure of sleep was too strong and I didn’t have it in me to venture out into the snow.

Nothing was going to happen, Oliver assured me, as if I hadn’t been the one to set that boundary. I was too tired to appreciate his courtesy in reaffirming it.

“Shame, because the bed where you and the girl you left me for used to have sex is such a turn on,” I said, my jaw cracking on a yawn. Then my words caught up with me and I shut it so quickly my teeth audibly clacked together, which thankfully made Oliver laugh.

“Don’t worry, she got the bed.”

That didn’t make me feel any better.

It was not any easier to fall asleep in Oliver’s bed with Oliver beside me. I couldn’t make my body relax, and my muscles were tight and sore from the loveseat anyway. Oliver grumbled that I was keeping _him_ awake. “Count sheep, or something.”

“Tell me a story,” I said.

“Really?”

“It’s either that or give me a neck massage.”

This time I knew for certain that Oliver’s sigh was one of resignation. Without warning, he leaned across me to turn on the beside lamp, and for a brief second I was blanketed in his warmth and the smell of his aftershave, which I had never entirely forgotten but which was once again intimately familiar after our three nights together in January.

I sat, blinking in the sudden brightness, as Oliver rubbed his eyes and stretched, trying to ignore the realization that, unlike at Peter’s house where he had been a guest, in his own home he slept shirtless. “Bring me the Whitman,” he said.

Paul raised his head to regard me with sleepy, doglike regard when I returned to the living room, blindly rummaging in my bag for the book. “Yeah, I know,” I told him. “I don’t know either.”

I had given up on any hope of wrapping my head around how the night was going and just let myself experience it, and if I thought I felt Oliver’s hand rubbing my back as I drifted off to his sleep-roughened voice reading me love poems, I wasn’t going to say anything about it.

I woke three hours later to an empty bed, and when I ventured out into the main room, I was met immediately by Paul’s tail battering my shins and the sight of Oliver making coffee in just his briefs, neither of which I was prepared for.

“Sorry,” Oliver said, correctly interpreting my tongue-tied halt, “I would have put something on, but I figured… a little too late for that.”

He had a point; it wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen all this and more, or as if I hadn’t slept next to him in this same level of undressed the previous night. It was just that I hadn’t expected him to be awake at this hour, let alone in the kitchen preparing both of us breakfast. It was uncomfortably domestic in a way I had never experienced with him, not even when we were sleeping together; back then other people had always cooked our breakfast for us and neither of us would have dreamed of wearing so little in a common area. I could see the full outline of his cock through his briefs.

I shook my head and edged around Paul, accepting a mug from Oliver in helpless silence as I joined him at the kitchen counter.

“I know you wake up early on Saturdays,” he explained.

I did wake up early on Saturdays; I had found it was the best time to secure practice rooms, when the majority of the student body was recovering from the sleepless nights of the week. I just hadn’t expected Oliver to know about it.

“Who told you – Gabriele.” A font of information, that one.

We once again managed to avoid eye contact as Oliver poured me coffee and cream – it didn’t escape my notice that he still knew how much I took – until finally, Oliver looked up from the depths of his own mug to ask, “is this weird?”

“No,” I said, but I said it too quickly, like I had on the first morning we had woken up together, when he had asked if I would hold the night against him and I had lied. This time, though, Oliver smiled at me, even if it was a little crooked, and that eased the weirdness some.

Now I saw why the Whitman was an ironic gift, he said, changing the subject. I admitted I didn’t remember much of it. I’d have to read it again, then. But probably best to tell Laurie I’d read it on my own. Then, when we had exhausted that line of conversation, he asked, “so, I’m curious. Why did you go on a date two days before Valentine’s Day?”

The real reason was that I had forgotten it was a holiday until the moment he asked me. But standing in his kitchen, wearing his shirt, while he stood beside me wearing practically nothing, made me feel exposed and a little defensive, and I didn’t want to admit I had forgotten. I would have to apologize to Laurie, too; it must have seemed to her that I wasn’t interested in pursuing anything serious from the moment I invited her, so close to the traditional day but not quite there.

“It wasn’t a serious date. And I’m doing something on Valentine’s,” I said. It was no more of a lie than my lie about spending Thanksgiving with Gabriele had been, and if I could lock down plans before Sunday then it wouldn’t be a lie at all. Face-saving and harmless.

Oliver raised his brows at me over the rim of his mug. “With friends?”

What an innocent question, and yet at the same time what a loaded one. It flustered me, and in my fumbling for an answer, I landed on a lie much less harmless than the first. “No,” I said, and then, when I saw Oliver’s expression shift into that one of hurt yet again, “well, yes. But not…” I trailed off. How could I give a justification, when there was nothing to justify in the first place?

The continuation of that unfinished sentence hung in the air. I knew what it sounded like. _But not_ as _friends._ I had put my foot in it again. I really ought to commit to just telling the truth in all situations; my lies always seemed to spiral out of my control.

After that, things were stilted again. The air of domesticity had vanished, replaced with the same careful avoidance we had perfected during the months of my fake relationship with Peter. Oliver offered breakfast, and I declined. I was afraid that if I stayed, he would ask for details and I would either be forced to perjure myself spinning an even more outrageous lie, or admit that I was so disconcerted by Oliver’s near-naked presence that I had temporarily lost control of my own tongue.

I left as quickly as I could with the excuse that the practice rooms would be filling up – so quickly, in fact, that I forgot I was still wearing Oliver’s shirt.

“If I keep giving you my clothes I’ll have to go in to work like this,” he joked, gesturing at himself, and I was helpless to stop my gaze following the sweep of his hand down his body. I swallowed.

I was grateful for his ability to joke about us, even when he was hurt by what he thought was my disinterest in him. It had sustained our tenuous friendship through my first year, and now that we were true friends again, it seemed Oliver would continue to smooth over my transgressions with humor.

I tried to reciprocate. “At least then people would stop asking me if your cock is proportionate to the rest of you.”

Oliver blinked in shock. “If my cock is – what do you _tell_ them?”

“Don’t worry; I was very flattering.”

“I feel like that’s an insult somehow,” Oliver said, laughing, and he let me go, shirt and all.

So, we were fine. We were fine, and I had yet another shirt of Oliver’s to hang in my closet and pretend I knew what the gifting of it meant. He wasn’t over me; I had known Peter was right before I had felt Oliver’s hand on my back and his lips on my forehead in the darkness of his room. But those feelings didn’t have to mean we couldn’t be friends. There was no hurry to figure out my own.

The hurry was in making my lie into the truth.

“Gabriele, I need you to go on a date with me,” I said without preamble, stepping through the door into our apartment. Gabriele looked up, startled, from his seat on schnapps couch.

“Where _were_ you last night?”

Peter, hearing my arrival, emerged from his room, sleep-rumpled and sporting an impressive hickey. Their curious expressions told me I had been right about their expectations for my night.

“The subway was down so I slept on Oliver’s couch,” I said, hoping that if I glossed over it and moved on I could avoid too much questioning, even if Peter looked as if he were metaphorically sitting on his hands to avoid asking about it. “I told him I was seeing someone on Valentine’s day.”

Peter failed. _“Again?”_

Gabriele, slightly more tactfully, just shrugged. “Sorry, man. He’ll never believe it if it’s me.”

I hated that he was right, and I hated Peter’s laughter even more.

Rebecca was doing some single-women solidarity thing with Nina for Valentine’s and all of my other friends were in relationships, which left me, to use Oliver’s expression, up a creek. That was the only explanation I had for why, as a last-ditch effort at rehearsal with Jamie later that day, I broached the subject.

“Sure,” Jamie said easily. “I’m doing a thing with Julia, but you’re welcome to join us.”

I backtracked. Spending a platonic Valentine’s Day with Jamie was bad enough, but third-wheeling his romantic day with Julia sounded like my nightmare. Jamie, however, just laughed at my stuttered apologies. “Julia is more likely to date _you_ than me. She thinks you’re great; you’re not crashing anything.”

Well, okay. If he was sure.

It was not without trepidation that I made my way to Jamie’s apartment on Sunday afternoon, nerves making me triple-check the address he had given me. While I had assumed him and Julia to be a couple, I had felt safe knowing that he was off-limits and therefore no longer a temptation. Now, I knew that they were just friends, and what was worse, I had talked myself into spending Valentine’s with them.

Luckily for my nerves, I thought Julia was great too, and her presence was a calming one. She was happy to have me, as Jamie had said she would be, and only politely curious about my reason for being there.

“Elio lied to his ex, so we’re his pretend Valentine’s date,” Jamie explained.

Julia nodded in understanding, as if that was a perfectly normal thing to do and not something to feel incredibly guilty over, the way I did. I would never understand how women approached relationships and breakups. “Been there. Was it a bad breakup? Or are you trying to pull the _we’re still friends_ thing?”

I was struggling to encapsulate the tragically farcical saga of my relationship with Oliver to a woman I barely knew when Jamie came to my rescue, drawing me into a friendly side-hug which ratcheted my nerves right back up to where they had been. “Julia! Let the man celebrate Valentine’s in peace. We’re here to help him _forget_ about her.”

There was no way in hell I was going to correct him.

We spent the afternoon drinking and watching romantic comedies, and I learned that this was a yearly tradition for them. They had been best friends since freshman year Spanish in high school and had begun it in the same way I had joined them now: a lie to get Julia’s high school ex off her back. Every year since they had spent at least part of the day watching movies together, whether they were single or not.

The coffee table was absolutely littered with VHS tapes. Julia laughed when I asked if she had brought so many to give us options and explained that they were, in fact, all Jamie’s. “He’s secretly a big softie,” she told me, conspiratorial.

“I am _not,_ ” he protested, as Julia shook her head and winked at me. “I just like the orchestrations.”

As the final image of _Desperately Seeking Susan_ faded to tv static, Julia announced that she had promised to spend the rest of the day with a friend who had just been dumped. I, too, started to rise, thinking the day was over, but Jamie placed his hand over mine on the couch. “Wait, Elio, don’t go yet. There’s a movie I want to show you.”

I hesitated. The warmth of Jamie’s hand pressing mine into the cushions sent my heartbeat spiking into my throat. I didn’t want to be alone with him. I wanted to have spent a completely normal Valentine’s with a friend and a woman who I thought could become a friend. I didn’t want to end it with the two of us, alone, drunk, watching sappy movies in the dark. I wouldn’t have done it with Oliver, and I certainly wasn’t about to do it with Jamie.

But then Julia rolled her eyes and said, “stay, Elio. He wants to geek out over the soundtrack and he knows I won’t let him; you’ll be saving me from listening to him wax poetic about oboes or whatever during our next movie night,” and with her insistence that I stay as well, I didn’t really have a leg to stand on in asking to leave.

Jamie declared we needed more alcohol for this one, which did not make me feel any less nervous, but it did give me a chance to sit by myself and breathe for a few moments while he retrieved more beers from the kitchen until he reappeared to sit beside me with a teasing, lilting, “so, was I your last choice?”

“Third, actually,” I said, throat dry. I busied myself with drinking my beer.

“I’m flattered,” Jamie said, and he sounded it. But, to my intense relief, he stood up again to rummage through the pile of tapes and, finding the one he was looking for, headed for the VCR. “Is it what Julia said? The trying-to-be-friends thing?”

I cradled the beer to my chest, choosing my words carefully. This new movie might feel more like a date than it had any right to, but Jamie still didn’t know I liked men, and I still wasn’t sure I wanted him to. “Yes, but… it was a while ago and it was in Italy, and now we’re both here, so…”

“You’re acting like it never happened.”

I shrugged. It was accurate enough to let him believe it, though it might be more accurate to say _like we both regret it._

The tape, it turned out, needed to be rewound, so, desperate to fill the silence with something other than the quiet whir of the VCR, I asked him about Julia. Just friends, he confirmed, to my dismay. “Sometimes I think I’ll end up marrying her, just because that’s the way it goes in all of these. But I don’t think it’d make either of us happy.”

I couldn’t tell if there was a vague hint about Jamie’s own sexuality hidden in that statement, and I didn’t pry. Unfortunately, the movie itself felt like an even firmer hint: _Maurice._ Julia had lent it to him because she thought he would find the music interesting, he said, darting a quick, nervous glance at me in the glow of the screen. “I don’t just – I don’t just own this.”

I did enjoy the movie, in large part because the main actor was exactly my type, but it was difficult to pay attention to the plot with Jamie beside me chattering on about the soundtrack. It sounded a little forced to my ears, as if he was talking more to distract me from the intensely homoerotic story playing out in front of us than out of a real desire to discuss music with me.

He also repeatedly declared that Hugh Grant was going to be a star, a heartbreaker, just you watch. No way, I said.

“Of course he is. Just look at that smile.”

“He looks like he’s not sure if he’s _allowed_ to smile.”

Women liked that, Jamie insisted. There was nothing sexier to women than shyness. No wonder he was single, then; his ego did him in. It wasn’t true, but it broke the tension.

Jamie shoved me, and I shoved him back, but I couldn’t let it descend into wrestling like I once had with Gabriele. It did not feel so confident that it would mean nothing to either of us. But we made it through the movie in one piece, and just before I left, Jamie said, “hey, invite your ex to hear my piece. Let her see the talent she gave up.”

“Are you complimenting yourself through me?” I asked, incredulous. But yeah, okay. I might.

My only blessing was that Jamie continued to say _she._

I didn’t talk about _Maurice_ to anyone. Gabriele still didn’t like Jamie, and Peter had already chewed me out for lying to Oliver again, so I didn’t want to stir the pot any further. I hadn’t told Daniel about staying with Oliver at all, since he would had questioned why I hadn’t just crashed with him and Anna. Rebecca might have been an option, but she, like Jamie, didn’t know about me, and that was not a conversation I felt up to having.

Oliver would have understood, of course, but he was the last person I could talk to about it. So instead, I spent my time overanalyzing every look Jamie sent my way when we rehearsed or studied or simply hung out together. It felt like the way I had catalogued Oliver’s moods, back when I hadn’t been sure of his feelings for me, before I was even sure of what my own feelings towards men were. I wasn’t particularly fond of the parallel.

I knew I was avoiding my friends, especially Peter and Gabriele, but being around them made me feel guilty, and I knew they could tell that there was something I wasn’t telling them. I felt like my life was spiraling out of my control; my two anchors were now out of my grasp and I didn’t know how to swim back to them. I missed their guidance, but more than that I missed just having them around.

Julia, however, continued to be great; I had been right in thinking that we could be friends. She, like Gabriele, knew something of what it was like to feel out of place in America – her parents were first-generation Venezuelan immigrants – and she was endlessly curious about my life in Europe. She wanted to move to Austria, she told me, and sing opera in Vienna.

Every now and then she would say cryptic things about Jamie, especially regarding our movie night: _he’s too much of a romantic for his own good_ or _I don’t think he knows what he wants._ I couldn’t tell if she was talking about herself or me.

One unseasonably warm day in march found Jamie and I alone in his apartment drilling rhythm exercises, which we both struggled with. Jamie had refused to open the windows so I had unbuttoned my shirt farther than normal, and my Star of David necklace swung forward through the gaping collar each time I nodded along to Jamie’s syncopated count.

Jamie had joked about the shirt, asking if everyone in Italy went around half-dressed once it hit sixty degrees. Fifteen, I told him.

_“Fifteen?”_

“Centigrade, dumbass.”

But now, with me lying on his carpet, propped up on my elbows to tap out beats in time with his, he leaned into my space and lifted the chain from my chest with one finger. “Pretty,” he said simply, his face very close to mine. I couldn’t breathe. “Why do you hide it?”

“I didn’t used to,” I managed. “Back when – “

Jamie knew Oliver was Jewish, though he knew little else. I still hadn’t dropped the _man_ bombshell. I didn’t seem to need to, what with the way Jamie was looking at me. His eyes were very, very blue up close. “It’s been two years. Don’t you think it’s time to move on?”

“Do you think I should?” My voice came out hoarse, and I desperately wished I could move away and clear my throat, collect my thoughts, but I was tethered there by Jamie’s one-fingered hold on my necklace.

“You’re a catch, Elio. You just have to stop clinging to the past and see what’s –“

Julia walked in the door, and the spell was broken. “Well, this is cozy.”

I scrambled away from Jamie and to my feet, buttoning my shirt with shaking hands. What had he been about to say? _Out there? In front of you?_ What had Julia walked in on?

I knew my flushed cheeks and breathless hello made it quite clear what _I_ thought she had, but I didn’t dare look at Jamie to see what _he_ thought. I could hear it, though, in his mumbled explanation that he had just been telling me to snap out of it and date someone.

Julia fixed him with a hard, searching look. I fled.

I didn’t tell anyone about that afternoon, either. They would have asked me what I had wanted to happen, and I wouldn't have had an answer for them beyond the fact that Jamie looked like Oliver, and he had touched my necklace in a way only Oliver had before, and he made me laugh the way Oliver did, and sometimes I couldn't tell the two of them apart in my wanting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy 2021, folks!
> 
> I'm also going to tryyyyy to increase the pace of updates because starting a week from now my life is about to get very busy and I want to get as much of this done as possible before that kicks in, so fingers crossed


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be completely honest with y'all and say that I was (and still am) pretty nervous to post this; it's been done for kind of a while (i.e. since before I posted chapter 10) but I've just been editing and re-editing it and I can't really put it off any longer so... I hope you like it? 
> 
> This chapter is why the homophobia and hurt/comfort tags are there, so be forewarned. But I can promise you that this is as bad as it gets; the next chapter is kind of a return to more what you're probably expecting but this one had to happen.

In April, Oliver left town for a conference with Professor Chamberlain, and I learned that the family who usually watched Paul had moved away and he had yet to find someone new. I could dogsit, I offered, and he accepted. And, as Oliver walked me through where Paul’s food and leash were, I dared to mention that I was playing in a showcase soon.

Oliver stilled. “This is James’ thing?”

Gabriele had been telling _fucking_ tales.

“Yeah,” I said, as if it meant nothing and as if thinking of Jamie and Oliver in the same breath didn’t leave me confused and agitated. “But I mean, only if you want to.”

Oliver said he would think about it. “I’ll have nothing else to do on the plane,” he joked, and I knew by that that it bothered him. He always turned jealousy into jokes. “I get too motion-sick to read. I always prefer trains.”

“Trains always make me think of you,” I admitted, to soothe the sting of it a little.

“That’s funny. Flying always makes me think of you.”

It was odd, being in Oliver’s space without Oliver there. It felt invasive. I couldn’t help but remember a time when I had had a _right_ to share his space; now, all we shared was an uncomfortable history and a toothbrush.

I was still reluctant to talk to any of my friends about _whatever_ was going on between Jamie, Oliver and I, but I had to talk to _someone_. And being at Oliver’s apartment again for the first time since Valentine’s day reminded me of the last time I had been there, so, since she had said I should and since I had indeed re-read _Leaves of Grass,_ I called Laurie.

Laurie agreed to walk “the infamous Apollonius” with me the next day, so we met in front of Oliver’s apartment and headed for Riverside Park. Spring had officially arrived, and with it the return of sunny days and warm weather, which Laurie had embraced wholeheartedly; she was the most fashionable person I knew besides Peter, but I could never quite adjust myself to the sheer vibrance of her outfits. It made me feel drab next to her.

It was so nice to take a walk in the sun, she announced, and even better to watch the light sparkling off the Hudson. If there was one thing she missed about Ohio, it was having grass around. I hadn’t been to a park since Thanksgiving, I realized, and I told her about running through leaves with Gabriele and Oliver and how much I missed the clear waters of Italy.

Laurie was quiet for a long time. Then, at last, she said, “you know, things are different now, especially here. A lot of people live their whole lives out of the closet.”

My heart sank.

I had wanted to talk to someone about everything that was currently tearing my mind to shreds, yes, in the hopes that speaking it out loud might help me wrangle all that confusion and overthinking into something resembling control again. But I had thought at least I might be able to ease into it, to frame the narrative in the way I wanted. I hadn’t expected – though perhaps I should have, given my track record of people telling _me_ I was queer, rather than the other way around – that she would be the one controlling the narrative.

And I knew that. It wasn’t as though she was telling me new information. I wasn’t sure where she had gotten hers; to the extent of my knowledge Laurie was as straight as they came, even if she did have an activist streak in her that might have led her into the circles I had only heard whispers of.

It was just that that wasn’t me. I was perfectly happy to live my life mostly in the closet, pining over one man who knew my secret and one who didn’t, dodging the concerned questions of the friends who had all figured it out without my having to come out to them. I liked it that way. And besides – “I like women.”

Laurie grinned at me. “I’d be offended if I thought you didn’t. But you like him too. More than like, maybe.”

How long had she known? Since I’d sat on her bed and talked about her professor instead of kissing her. So the Whitman – had been on purpose.

With that part of my secret out in the open, there was no reason not to tell her the rest of it. So I talked as we walked back to Oliver’s apartment together, beginning with my arrival in New York and heading eventually towards the dilemma I now found myself in. By the time we reached Oliver’s front stoop I had barely made it to Thanksgiving, so I invited her up for a drink, if she wanted one.

“Not particularly,” she told me, “but I’m _dying_ to know how this ends.”

So we sat on Oliver’s tiny loveseat and I told her about the night after our date, and watching Maurice with Julia and Jamie, and Jamie grabbing my necklace and calling it _pretty,_ and how I didn’t know what any of it meant. Laurie called me an idiot.

“You’re _so_ into him.”

“You think so? I just don’t know.”

Laurie rolled her eyes. “Not that Jamie kid; I don’t give a shit about him. Professor Katz.”

Alright, I did know that, but it was more complicated than she was making it seem.

It was and it wasn’t, she said. “My brother ran away when he was seventeen. I was ten. He lives here in New York now, with his partner; I’ve gotten dinner with them a few times. So I’m not talking out of my ass here when I say that as hard as it is for you to be honest with Professor Katz, you’ve been honest with _me_ and my expert opinion is that you should just fuck him already.”

“I’m not about to do that.”

“Because you’re worried you’ll mess everything up if you do.”

How could I not? I already messed everything up every time I tried to treat Oliver as anything other than a platonic friend, even in the smallest of ways. Take the night I had spent at his place, for example; I had blurred the lines, and then I had panicked and gone and done a stupid thing and thrown myself into this whole mess with Jamie. I could barely be trusted to be friends with Oliver, let alone lovers. _Partners_ was almost out of the question.

I was just scared, Laurie told me, but didn’t I think Oliver was scared too? He’d been through hell, it sounded like, with a failed engagement and an unsupportive family; he must be equally wary of messing it up, if not more so. Why didn’t I just kiss him and see what happened?

But I couldn’t just decide that that was the direction I should take, or that Oliver was the be-all end-all of my sexuality, the trajectory I had always been meant to follow. I needed to be sure, before I chose him, that I had at least _looked_ at the other options. Like James. Or like Laurie.

“ _Please._ You weren’t into me the two times you explicitly asked me on a date; don’t try to tell me you’re into me now.”

“Technically, you asked me on the first one,” I pointed out, “and I could be. You’re beautiful.”

Laurie snorted. The truth was that she _was;_ even her derision had a sort of charm to it. I was sure she had broken hearts before, even if mine probably wasn’t destined to be one of them. “Tip number one, if you’re _actually_ trying to get into a girl’s pants, you tell her she’s hot. My mother tells me I’m beautiful.”

“Who says I’m not?”

Laurie said, “on my professor’s couch?” in a tone that was more intrigued than scandalized, so I threw caution to the wind and told her about sleeping with Marzia, and about trying to sway Oliver into sleeping with Chiara. I couldn’t explain that a part of me wanted to have kissed someone on Oliver’s couch, even if it wasn’t Oliver himself, but I tried.

Laurie, as the child of two psychiatrists, was fascinated. I wished I had known what her parents did for a living before I had begun telling her all of my secrets, which, she informed me, was why she hadn’t disclosed it until just then. “I wouldn’t want to be in _your_ brain.” She looked at me thoughtfully. Finally, she announced, “you can kiss me if you want. But if you really want to figure this out, I’m not the right person to do it with.”

Horrifyingly, I felt myself beginning to tear up. It was only the relief of finally having found someone who would listen, and someone who knew a thing or two about giving advice, to boot, I told myself. I had felt alone and judged, and this was just a release of emotions.

Laurie let me blink back tears for a few minutes in silence before her patience wore thin. “You’re the worst date I’ve ever had,” she said, rolling her eyes, then winked at me. “And I want my book back.”

I promised her I would bring it with me the next time we hung out and retreated to the bathroom to splash water on my face and collect myself. I caught sight of my reflection in the small mirror – red-rimmed eyes, embarrassed flush, a drawn, tired face. Snap the fuck out of it, I told myself. Get over yourself and just make a decision, for once in your life.

Easier said than done.

I emerged from the bathroom to find Laurie hastily replacing a book on Oliver’s coffee table – his own, on Heraclitus. Her posture was oddly defensive, but I wasn’t in a state to question it just then. “Is it any good?”

“It’s incredible.”

Jamie’s showcase rolled around a week later with no word from Oliver save a terse phone call thanking me for looking after Paul – he was spoiled now; he kept begging for long walks even despite his arthritis. It wasn’t until Julia and I had stepped down from the stage to stand by while people congratulated Jamie that I even knew Oliver had come. He shook Jamie’s hand, then Julia’s, and then pulled me into a surprising but not unwelcome hug.

Jamie and Julia took Oliver’s praise with grace, though both of them looked a little blindsided by the embrace. I would have brushed it off, would have thought up some story to tell them later, were it not for Oliver turning to Jamie once more, still standing too close to me for propriety, and saying, “so you’re the Valentine’s day date.”

Was this a ploy? Was this the same kind of theatrics Peter had been so fond of, all those times he had sat too close or held my hand, all the while staring daggers at Oliver, daring him to be jealous? That wasn’t fair, to me or to Jamie. I glared at him, hoping he would take it for the cease-and-desist it was intended to be.

Jamie looked between me and Oliver suspiciously, eyes narrowed. “Yeah, I am. And… you are?”

A friend of the family. My parents couldn’t make it, obviously, so Oliver was there to report back. They sent their love and said I should call more often, by the way.

Oliver was rambling, overly cheerful. I was furious. I hadn’t told Jamie anything about Oliver as a _friend_ , let alone the elephantine secret that he was the mystery ex-lover Jamie had suggested I invite to this very performance. He was about to blow my cover, and for what? To assuage his own jealousy?

Julia was watching me fume, but Jamie, at least, seemed mollified by Oliver’s false cheer. He asked Oliver’s opinion, and when Oliver admitted to being a bit of a snob, Jamie laughed, a little challenging, and said, “I can’t imagine you getting along very well with Elio, then, if you’re a classical music purist.”

Not so, Oliver countered. The first piece I had ever played for him was the best interpretation of Bach he’d ever heard. Well, first three pieces, really.

“Let me guess. Liszt, Busoni, Bach?”

The tense moment was over, and Oliver left before I could ask him what the fuck he had been thinking, riling up James like that. He couldn’t have been doing me a favor; Oliver was not so immature to think he could spur Jamie into confessing any feelings he might have for me simply out of jealousy. They were too similar.

And how could Oliver know there was a possibility of Jamie having feelings for me at all? Had Gabriele said something? Had I just been too obvious, once again?

I tried to put it out of my mind, as Jamie declared that he, Julia and I should go out to celebrate, but I was too rattled by Oliver’s behavior to be around other people at just that moment, so I lied yet again and said I was busy.

Jamie shrugged. “Then Julia and I will celebrate now, and you and I will celebrate tomorrow,” he said, and the gleam in his eye said _don’t argue._

What had Oliver wrought?

Once home, I confronted Gabriele over his betrayal to Oliver, but he said he hadn’t told Oliver anything. “I wouldn’t do that, Elio, come on. But – what do you think you’re doing here? Playing them off each other? Oliver didn’t do anything worse than you’ve already done. You’re going to get hurt, and you’ve already hurt him.”

I knew things were bad if Gabriele was starting to sound like Peter. Peter said nothing. I couldn’t blame him.

I couldn’t account for Oliver’s behavior. It smacked of jealousy, but more than that, it felt _deliberate._ As if Oliver was trying to hasten something along that I couldn’t see coming and wasn’t even sure I wanted to arrive at at all. Or maybe, I realized, bridling at the idea of it, he was trying to _protect_ me from some danger he had concocted. If he believed, as he had with Gabriele, that there was a chance Jamie might react poorly, perhaps his actions were a coded warning, to one or both of us?

But Oliver didn’t know Jamie, and he didn’t know _me,_ if he thought I would welcome that sort of interference in my life. I didn’t need protecting. Just because I had left myself vulnerable to him and gotten hurt didn’t mean I was stupid enough to do it again. I was being cautious, as I had always been with Jamie; I would not get my hopes up about this celebration and therefore no one could dash them.

I headed for Jamie’s apartment the next day with my stomach in knots. I still wasn’t sure I wanted him to be jealous. My conversation with Laurie still rang in my ears; could I in good conscience say yes to anything Jamie might want, when I still wanted Oliver so badly? Was Gabriele right, and I was hurting all three of us by being dishonest? Probably.

It was small consolation that when I arrived, Jamie looked as nervous as I felt. I started to ask where we were celebrating, but he cut me off with a breathless, “I have to ask you something.”

This was it. This was the moment I had to decide, once and for all, whether I wanted to cling to the possibility of something-someday with Oliver, if I was ready to be brave, or if I wanted to cut my losses and try for something new, _now_ , with a man who, for all he confused me, was so much less complicated than Oliver was.

“Sure, what?”

“You didn’t tell him about Valentine’s Day, did you,” Jamie said. It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t specify who _he_ was, but he didn’t have to.

No, I hadn’t. Did I know who had? No, I didn’t know that either. We had met in Italy. Yes. Three years ago? Yes.

“You never said.”

I had been afraid. I was still afraid. But Jamie’s eyes on mine were so pleading, and I didn’t know what he was pleading for me to say, so I said nothing.

“You let me think –“ he started, shook his head, cut himself off. “Why didn’t you just –“

“Are you angry with me?”

Jamie laughed, incredulous. “Am I –“ It seemed as though he couldn’t finish any of his sentences. I empathized.

Jamie took one slow, deliberate step towards me, eyes never leaving mine. There was still a question in them, still a furrow to his brow as he came to within one breath of me and stopped. I closed my eyes.

He pushed me and I stumbled, tripping over my own feet. Jamie followed, crowding me back towards the wall and pinning me there. “Tell me how long you’ve wanted this.”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. Kiss me, I thought, or don’t, but make up your mind and do it quickly so I can stop being so confused around you all the time.

“Who have you told?”

“No one. One person.”

“Him?”

“No.”

Jamie shut his eyes like he was in pain, dropping his forehead to the arm braced against the wall above my head. His voice was quiet, mournful. “We could have been _friends,_ Elio.”

“We are friends,” I said, bewildered, my heart sinking. Something was happening here that I didn’t understand, but I felt acutely that something had broken between us.

It became painfully clear _what_ , as Jamie stepped away, fixed me with a cold, hard stare, and scoffed. “I could never be friends with you. Not like this.”

_What?_

Had I been wrong, all this time? Had I misread things so badly? And what was more, had Oliver been right in telling me that people changed, once they knew? That someone as affable and kind as Jamie could transform into the sneering, horrified man in front of me now, telling me our year of friendship was now invalid, impossible, now that he knew the secret I had – wisely, it turned out – kept from him?

And what _like this?_ There was no _like this;_ Jamie had asked _me_ the question, and I hadn’t even answered. What did he think was going on?

“ _This._ You think I want you in my house, thinking about fucking me?” he said, and I now heard that incredulity for what it was: disgust. Fear, even.

I don’t – I didn’t –

“Oh, my mistake, sorry, _you_ get fucked.”

Don’t do this, I thought. Don’t do this, don’t ruin this, please don’t be the first person who does this to me. Not you, not the one person I thought might be the answer to what I wanted, what I needed if I didn’t want or need Oliver. Don’t be the person who makes me feel the way Oliver worried Gabriele would make me feel, the way his parents had made him feel; don’t hurt me like this.

“Don’t do this.”

“You know what?” Jamie said, backing further away from me as if _I_ was the dangerous one, as if I was the one speaking daggers to him and not the other way around. “I was wrong. Go back to your little summer fling, because you’re sure as hell not getting that from me.”

“Jamie,” I tried, pleading. If we could just _talk_ about it, if I could reassure him that it had been a misunderstanding, I wasn’t about to try anything, it hadn’t even really been _him_ I wanted – or that if it had, I could get over it, it didn’t have to ruin anything – but Jamie recoiled like I had slapped him.

“Don’t fucking call me that.” _Please,_ I thought. Please don’t. But Jamie turned his back on me, shoulders hunched in panic or fury or something between the two, and didn’t look at me again. “Get out. Get the _fuck_ out.”

I obeyed, stumbling out the door and down the hall, unable to comprehend what was happening to me. I had been so wrong. I had been so wrong, and so stupid, and so blinded by the desire to find someone other than Oliver that I had latched on to the one person in my life who would hate me for doing it. I was such an idiot.

The elevator doors opened and I shoved past their occupant as she exited, ignoring her confused, “Elio? What –“

Julia. Great. Now she would know, too. Fuck you, Oliver, I thought. Fuck you for opening your big jealous mouth and bringing this on me, and fuck me too for conjuring up a love triangle in the first place.

As the elevator doors slid closed, I heard Julia’s voice drifting down the hallway. “What’s wrong? Where’s Elio going?” But thankfully, the jolt of the elevator starting to move cut off any possibility of hearing Jamie’s – _James’_ – reply. I knew it wouldn’t be words I wanted to hear.

Once out of the safety of the elevator, I didn’t know what to do.

I couldn’t go home; in my frantic state all I could think was that Peter and Gabriele would say _I told you so_. I couldn’t go to Rebecca; she loved James and I couldn’t risk _her_ rejection as well. I couldn’t go to Laurie; she was in class with –

Oliver.

Fuck you, Oliver. Fuck you for being the only person I can turn to.

I didn’t know how I made it through the subway ride to Columbia; all I was aware of was my own hitching breaths and my desperate hope that the New York tendency to ignore anyone and everyone around you on the subway would keep anyone from asking if I was okay, because I was certain that if I opened my mouth to speak I would burst into tears. I made it all the way through the halls of Hamilton, up the stairs, into Oliver’s classroom, and was almost proud of myself for keeping it together on the journey, but then Oliver said, “Elio?” and I felt my face crumple.

Oliver was at my side so quickly I thought he must have run, calling out a, “class dismissed; check your syllabus for Wednesday’s reading.” He walked me to his office with an arm around my shoulders, keeping my face tucked toward his side so I didn’t have to see what I was sure were the curious stares of the hallway’s other occupants. Fuck him for being so kind, too.

The minute his office door had closed behind us, he pulled me into a fierce hug, pressing kisses into my hair just as I had felt him do on the night this whole mess had begun, half-asleep in his bed, only as real as a dream.

“What’s wrong? Is it your parents?”

I had no voice to answer. I shook my head.

“Peter?”

A headshake.

“Gabriele?”

A headshake, again.

Oliver paused. “James?”

A hitched breath, so slight I thought Oliver might not even have heard it were he not listening for it.

Then Oliver’s hands were cupping my cheeks, raising my eyes to meet his and holding me there for his worried perusal. “Is he alright? Did he do something? Are you hurt? Did he hurt you? Elio, did he hurt you?”

I shook my head again. Was I hurt? I couldn’t tell. I was stunned, and upset, but mostly I was angry – with Oliver and with myself. I couldn’t think about Jamie for long enough to be angry with him, because thinking about him made me flare white-hot with shame. To think I had been so sure he would kiss me that I had _closed my eyes_ – what must he have thought?

I didn’t have to wonder about that one, I supposed.

“He didn’t hurt you?” Oliver repeated, as if my headshake hadn’t been answer enough. But I didn’t _have_ an answer, so I just shrugged. Oliver made a sound of frustration. “Elio –“

Oliver’s office door opened. I couldn’t see who entered, with Oliver’s hands keeping my face turned towards his, but I heard Rebecca’s voice clearly enough. “Elio? Julia called and told me what – and I called everyone and Gabriele said you would be here, and Daniel told me how to find – oh.”

I knew what it must look like, hot on the heels of Julia’s damning phone call. At the very least, I thought, this meant that Rebecca, and therefore probably Julia, were alright with it. I hadn’t lost three friends in one day.

“I’m okay,” I told her. It was a pathetic attempt, and Rebecca rightfully didn’t buy it.

“She said he said –“

I didn’t want to hear what Jamie had said. Not then, not ever. “I’m _fine,”_ I said, raising my head just enough to turn and look at her, uncaring that my red-rimmed eyes gave the lie to _that_ statement too. “I just… needed to talk to a friend.”

Something in Rebecca’s expression changed, going hard and cold. It was too like Jamie’s eyes just before he had turned his back on me and kicked me out of his apartment, and I couldn’t look at it. I tucked my face back into the crook of Oliver’s neck.

“I am your friend, Elio.”

That was hurt turning her voice to stone, I realized. I had kept her out of the loop, and she was hurt. She, of everyone, had come to find me, because she hadn’t known that Oliver was the one I needed, because I hadn’t told her.

I was the worst.

“Rebecca,” Oliver said, his voice as gentle as his hand rubbing circles into my lower back, “don’t do this right now.”

“He needs –“

“He needs someone who understands.”

Rebecca said nothing more, but she stayed in Oliver’s office for a full minute longer, evidently having some silent conversation with him. I didn’t care what it was. Let them talk about me above my head; let Rebecca report back to Daniel and Gabriele and Julia whatever conclusion she came to based on it. I couldn’t face any of them right now to tell them myself.

The door opened and closed, and we were alone again. Oliver pushed me away, gently, just far enough so that he could look at me again. “Elio, look at me, okay? I’m going to let go, and then we’re going to sit down, alright?”

I let him guide me to the floor, wrapping my arms around my knees in an attempt to make myself as small as possible. Oliver settled in next to me and drew me back into his side. I hated myself for finding such comfort in it when I was still angry with him for exposing me in front of Jamie.

I knew, rationally, that it wasn’t his fault, or mine; that Jamie must have had suspicions already and that the truth would have come out eventually no matter what. Better sooner than later, probably. But I could and would still feel angry about it.

“I’m such an idiot.”

“No, you’re not,” Oliver said firmly. “You were wrong, but we all are, sometimes.”

I still didn’t know who Oliver had been wrong in telling – Nancy, probably, or his parents. But it did make me feel better to remember that I was not alone in this feeling; that everyone like me probably went through it. And here I was, with a sympathetic ear, someone who would rub my back and tell me he understood. I was lucky. I could have been a seventeen-year-old in Ohio with nowhere to turn, or a twenty-seven-year-old on Thanksgiving who thought he had no one to talk to.

I had been there for Oliver then; I couldn’t hate him for being there for me now.

How had he known, I wanted to know. Why had his first thought been that James had done something, rather than something having happened to James? _James._ Not Jamie, not anymore. His friends called him Jamie, and I certainly no longer owned that designation. It was easier if I dropped the nickname, even in my head.

“I got a letter. Written on my own stationery, slipped into my own book.”

Laurie. Of course. She _had_ been acting suspicious. Meddler.

Well, then. A letter.

Oliver let go of me long enough to grope behind and above him, blindly rifling through papers until he found the letter in question. I sat numbly, back pressed against his battered desk, while he read aloud. _“Hi Professor Katz, this is Laurie. I hope your conference went well. Apollonius is a stupid name for a dog but he’s very sweet. Sorry for looking through your things.”_

I smiled despite myself. How very like Laurie, to apologize to Oliver and insult his choice in pet names in the same breath. Listening to Oliver’s low, even voice reading Laurie’s matter-of-fact words, I found, made it just a bit easier to breathe.

_“I didn’t kiss Elio in your apartment. He asked me to, but I know it’s just because it’s really you he wants to be kissing. He didn’t have a date for Valentine’s, either, just a boy who’s going to break his heart sooner or later. You should go to his concert.”_

“That sneaky bitch,” I said, shaking my head in rueful disbelief. I couldn’t be mad at Laurie, either. She had only done what she thought in my best interests, and she had been right, in the end. James _had_ broken my heart, though not in the way either she or Oliver might have thought he would, and James alone should shoulder the blame for that.

Oliver laughed. “Did you tell her?”

“She just knew. From the way I talked about you.”

“And him.”

“No. Just you.”

I wasn’t ready for Oliver to know that, not really, but the truth was that I wasn’t sure I would ever be ready. I was not impulsive, or decisive; that I had taken the first steps to bring us together the first time was a fluke, a moment of uncharacteristic bravery. Left to my own devices I would probably have let us languish in this purgatory until one or the other of us gave up and moved on.

I could admit to myself, in the quiet of Oliver’s office with Oliver’s warm presence grounding me, that I had wanted James, irrespective of who he looked like or what he reminded me of. I still didn’t know if I would have taken the chance on him, but the desire had been there.

And there had been signs, too, that I might have caught if I hadn’t been so caught up in teasing out that desire: the way Jamie looked at me when wee were alone, as if he had a question he wanted to ask but was afraid of the answer, his discomfort with the topic of homosexuality or the idea that people might read that sort of relationship into our interactions, his constant usage of the word _she_ when he talked about Oliver – all things I had taken for reciprocation, but that could have just as easily been a desperate attempt to convince himself I wasn’t what he thought I was.

I had been lucky, up till that point. But it wasn’t fair, either, that it was up to me to watch my own back; that I had to be the one on the lookout. I shouldn’t have to live my life like that.

Maybe Laurie was right; maybe living out and proud was easier. That way, at least, you knew where you stood.

And I did know where I stood, with Oliver if not with everyone else. I knew what he had hoped for me, what he still must, and I was tired of letting him hope it and not saying anything to the contrary. So, though I wouldn’t have called it bravery, I did somehow manage to find the fortitude, or the determination, to look Oliver in the eye while I did.

“This isn’t fun and games for me, Oliver. It never has been. I know you think it should be, but it’s not, and I’m never not going to want this, with you or with someone else if you don’t want me back. And if this is what you were afraid of, then it’s too late, because I –“

Oliver’s head dropped back against the solid wood of the desk with a hollow, painful thump. “I knew it,” he said, tight with self-recrimination. “I knew this would happen. That I would –“

“Mess me up? I was messed up long before you came along; don’t flatter yourself.” I was tired of his martyr act, of being treated like I was delicate or like he had _damaged_ me, like he had something to atone to even now that I had forgiven him. Like his sin wasn’t having abandoned me but having wanted me at all. I wasn’t ashamed of who I was, even if James had done his best to make me, and I wouldn’t let Oliver tell me I should be. “Your dick isn’t that special.”

Oliver was momentarily shocked into silence. Neither one of us had ever alluded so explicitly to the sexual aspect of our relationship, and certainly never so flippantly; we had both been tiptoeing around it for each other’s sake, I supposed.

Maybe that had been stupid. Maybe if we had talked out fully to begin with, we could have come to some sort of accord. Maybe if I were more like Peter, or more like Oliver, if I spoke their playful, facetious language, I could have shocked Oliver out of his self-pity and me out of mine.

Then Oliver smiled at me. “Well, that’s just hurtful.”

I couldn’t help but smile back. Perhaps all was not lost, if we could still make these incremental, irreverent steps.

I let the silence hover between us, allowing myself a space to just… be. To just sit there, quietly, with Oliver, and know that he understood. Oliver let me, until the unspoken _thing_ between us began to push against the silence, demanding an audience. “Was Laurie right?” he asked, just barely loud enough to disturb my quiet.

It was disturbance enough. How could he, right now, after I had just been laid bare in front of him? When I was still reeling from the discovery that he knew, not because I had told him, but because someone else had figured it out, just like my life always seemed to happen?

I couldn’t. Not now, not until I had had some time to process everything. I couldn’t, and he couldn’t, and it wasn’t fair of him to ask me to.

“I’m not going to,” he said, too rushed to be truly soothing. “I just need to know.”

“Why is this so hard?” I whispered. It wasn’t an answer, but I knew that in not giving him one I had essentially told him what it would be when I did.

Because the world wasn’t fair. Because some people, like him and me, got dealt shit hands and just had to work with what we’d been given. Because I wanted him, even though my life would be so much easier if I didn’t, and I was tired of finding reasons to pretend he wasn’t my end-all be-all, when the dust settled.

When I had told him, in Italy, it wasn’t because I’d thought he would – I hadn’t had any expectations, or really any hopes. I had just been so ashamed. And I had known I couldn’t tell anyone else.

“You’ve got people now.”

I did; I knew that. I would go home to Peter and Gabriele and accept whatever _we-told-you-sos_ they wanted to give me, and then we would move on and they would rib me for it and things would be okay. But in that moment, in that office, none of that mattered.

“And I still only want you.”

I saw in his eyes the same confused roil of emotions I had felt for the past two years – triumph, definitely, and relief, but hesitation and concern as well. And hurt, though he tried to hide it. I knew how it must look, my confessing to him only after my other viable option had turned me down, after I had lied and put him off for so long. It must seem like he was an afterthought.

Had I meant it the way he had taken it? I wasn’t sure. In the immediate, I had just meant that it was him I had come to when I needed a friendly face. In the long term… it wasn’t strictly true, because I had wanted James – still did want him, with a small, wounded part of my soul that would take slightly longer to heal than the rest of me – but in some respects, it had always been the _only_ truth, the only constant of my sexuality. Oliver had been there at the start, and whatever happened in between, I knew I wanted him to be there at the end. Whenever that came.

“Elio – “ he said, and cut himself off before he could give voice to any of that. I wished he would just say it. Even if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear – even if I could have said what that would be – I was tired of putting this off, tired of people telling me it was up to _me_ to say what happened between us. I wanted him to choose for me.

He did. “You’re not in a place to have this conversation right now.”

I knew it was the right choice, and that I couldn’t be trusted to make rational decisions in that moment, but it still came as a disappointment. I had spent a summer hearing him say things just like that, telling me I didn’t know my own emotions just because I was young and inexperienced.

And I knew too that he was saying it for my benefit. Peter was right; Oliver was not over me, and he was pulling the same self-sacrificial act he had been luxuriating in since we had become re-acquainted. I just hadn’t seen it so clearly until now.

Later, he promised, as if he could see my hackles rising. We would talk later.

I would hold him to it.

I lingered in Oliver’s office as long as I could, allowing him to rub my back and murmur soothing nonsense and pretending there wasn’t a chance one or the other of us would get cold feet and pull back from this yet again. I wanted to sit with him forever and never have to face the outside world again, particularly whatever might await me when I returned to my apartment. If Rebecca had called everyone, as she said, then everyone knew. And knowing my friends, everyone would be there waiting for me.

Everyone was.

It was almost funny, to walk into my own home and come face to face with eight pairs of worried eyes – including Laurie and Julia, one of which was expected, the other decidedly not. It felt like facing down a panel of jurors, or like playing my final pieces at the end of the semester. My feet refused to move.

I sighed. Set down my jacket. Spread my arms wide. “Well, go on. You can say I told you so.”

“We would never,” said Gabriele.

That meant more than Gabriele could ever know, after all of his snide warnings to me about James, but it still wasn’t enough to draw me further into the room. There were too many people looking at me, and my nerves were still too raw to bear that much scrutiny.

Peter rose from the couch and crossed the room to me, slowly, as if I might spook at his approach. When he came to stand before me, he angled his body so as to shield me from the view of the rest of the room, I thought, before pulling me into a hug.

I let myself melt into his embrace. I should have come straight home; _this_ was what I had needed. I had needed to talk to Oliver, too, but I should have done this first.

“I’m a little offended you’re attracted to _him_ and not to me,” Peter whispered, and I could do nothing but hide my helpless laughter in his neck. “There’s our Elio. We’ve missed you, dude.”

I still couldn’t bring myself to look at anyone else, but Peter spun us around so that I faced the room at large with him behind me, his arms wrapped loosely around me and hands clasped over my stomach, chin hooked over my shoulder. “Look. They all know, and they still like you.”

And then Izzy said, “fuck. No one told me this was a baby shower,” and as the room erupted in laughter and Peter steered me to sit between him and Izzy on the couch, I allowed myself to think, for the first time since fleeing James’ apartment, that things might go back to normal.

That seemed more and more likely the longer I sat there – Rebecca still looked blindsided, and perhaps a little bitter she hadn’t been told, and Laurie and Julia both looked guilty, but for the most part, everyone acted as though this were just an ordinary Monday-evening gathering. Not that we ordinarily gathered on Monday evenings, but I was glad to entertain the fiction. Anna and Izzy had begun a competition to see who could think of the hottest celebrity they could set me up with. Laurie was the reigning champion with Meryl Streep, until Gabriele said, “you’re all wrong. It’s Marcello Mastroianni.”

Amidst cries of foul and assertions that Gabriele shouldn’t be allowed to name celebrities no one but the two of us had heard of, I leaned against Peter and thought that my father and Oliver were right: I had found my people.

Julia left first, after thanking me for not kicking her out immediately. James would come around, she told me. He had just been scared. I didn’t know how to take that. Rebecca trailed her out the door, with a chagrined apology for being sharp with me before, and Anna and Izzy followed.

Laurie apologized for leaving Oliver the letter but I told her the conclusion I had come to in Oliver’s office: that no one was to blame but James himself. The truth has a way of coming out eventually. Laurie had to tilt her face up to smile at me from our hug. “I knew you’d see it my way. And, hey – I watched my brother go through this, and it sucks, but now you’ve got it out of the way. Anything after this is going to hurt a lot less.”

And then it was just me, Daniel, Gabriele, and Peter. And for a moment, it was tense. This is it, I thought. This is the moment when it dawns on them that my liking men is not a theoretical thing, that I’m not so hopelessly dedicated to Oliver that I can’t be attracted to anyone else – to one of them, even. But then Daniel dashed all that by clapping me on the shoulder and saying, “so are we going to get this orgy started, or what?”

Peter said that he’d have to call Izzy and ask her permission first, and Daniel called him whipped, and I could do nothing but sit there and process the fact that they were joking about the possibility of having sex with me. I might have expected it from Peter, who had, after all, kissed me and pretended to date me for over half a year – but from Gabriele, who as recently as Thanksgiving had been uncomfortable enough with my sexuality that he had to reassure himself I had no interest in him, or from Daniel, who hadn’t spoken of the subject directly since our drunk conversation outside Hartley a year and a half ago? That was almost beyond belief.

If only James had been as okay with things as they had been, even back then.

But they hadn’t been, Daniel said.

They hadn’t? But none of them had ever given me any indication they were anything more than vaguely uncomfortable with it. Certainly none of them had ever said the sort of things James had said.

“Yeah, because we’re not massive assholes.”

“Remember how I waited a week to bring it up?” Peter said, from his position next to me on the couch, his arm draped casually over the back, fingers brushing my shoulder. “I thought about asking for a transfer.”

“I thought I knew what was happening for a month before I could say anything,” Gabriele told me, “and I still hoped I was wrong.”

Daniel just shrugged. “I was really fucking drunk. I don’t think it even sank in until the next morning.”

That was all news to me. It seemed impossible that I hadn’t noticed them struggling with the realization. I had thought it was either a yes or no sort of thing; you were alright with it or you weren’t. A childish view of the world, I now saw.

“Yeah, a bit,” Gabriele said. “But we got over it, because you’re you, and you were worth re-examining our prejudices for.”

No one had ever told me I was worth re-examining anything before. I didn’t know how to thank him for it.

The next day, I took advantage of the few hours I had alone in the apartment when both Peter and Gabriele were in class to call my parents. I hadn’t intended to tell them about James, but the minute my mother asked me how the recital had gone, the whole story seemed to flood out of me and I was helpless to stop it.

If Oliver and I ever – if I were to take him up on the promise of that _later_ talk, would they…

“Oliver is already a part of our family, darling,” my mother said. “In whatever way that manifests itself.”

But if it didn’t work out –

You can’t live your life based on what you think will make other people happy, my father said. You have to follow what makes _you_ happy.

I didn’t know if Oliver could make me happy. But I knew that I would never know unless we talked about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have... complicated feelings about James, but I gotta say it was SUCH a struggle to see your comments about him and not be like WELL YOU SEE-- lol
> 
> Tell me if you called it, because I'm curious!


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not only do they finally talk, they talk TWICE. Never let it be said I don't give people what they want. (Except I don't; this is just where we are in the plot.)

Oliver never followed up on that _later_. I told myself he was busy, and I was busy, and it wasn’t the right time, anyway. He was giving me the space I needed.

But the end of term arrived with still no _later_ , so it fell to me to initiate it. I left for Oliver’s office with Peter and Gabriele’s good luck wishes to propel me on through the anxious, confused excitement in my chest. I didn’t know what would happen, or what I wanted to happen, but I knew that we were headed for some sort of reckoning.

When I saw Oliver, his professorial persona and its according dress code dropped with the end of classes, casual shirt and the espadrilles he had never shaken the habit of wearing indoors in the summer, I lost all of my words. “You never called.”

He hadn’t been sure I would want him to.

Well. I had.

Oliver seemed reluctant to begin, so I told him about my conversation with my parents and how they had essentially given me their blessing for whatever relationship I decided I wanted with him. Oliver laughed and asked if he got a vote in this decision I was supposedly making.

“I just meant that – if we tried, and it didn’t work, you wouldn’t lose them. Us.” _Again,_ I didn’t say.

Oliver thanked me for thinking of him and told me to thank my parents for the kind gesture. But it didn’t change anything. Nothing was going to happen between the two of us.

But he had said –

He’d said we’d talk.

What had changed? Why, after all his talk of _wanting it less_ and _being good_ , after all the times he’d looked away and made a joke to hide that he was jealous, why had he chosen _now_ to be noble? I hadn’t even told him for certain that I _wanted_ to try, and here he was shutting me down before I’d even begun.

Oliver gave a sigh so filled with frustration that it was almost a growl, raking his fingers through his hair and grabbing the back of his neck with both hands; grounding himself, it looked like. Like he was still determined to be _good_ , no matter how much it cost him, no matter that I now no longer wanted him to. “Maybe this isn’t fun and games for you. But I’ve seen you, with Marzia, and with Laurie, and I know you could live that life and be happy. Your parents would welcome me with open arms, yes, but the rest of the world wouldn’t. If there’s a path where you don’t have to experience that, I won’t tempt you down another one just because I’m selfish.”

“I’m happy with _you.”_

“This life, _my_ life, is hard,” he began, gesturing broadly at himself, me, the room, the world in general, probably. It was infuriating. Did he think I didn’t know? Did he think that I, having lived in New York City for two years, hadn’t seen what it was like? That I hadn’t _felt_ what it was like, just a month ago? Did he really think me so sheltered?

I let my anger speak for me. “And what life is that? The one where you get engaged and pretend everything is normal until you can’t anymore just so you can wallow in self-pity when she sees through you? So you never have to own your own mistakes? You always have to be the fucking martyr, Oliver.”

Oliver did growl, this time, his hands twitching at his sides like he wanted to grab me and shake some sense into me. “It’s not martyrdom, it’s called caring about your welfare –“

“It’s called projecting your own fears onto other people so you don’t have to face the possibility of being happy,” I said. Snarled, a little, maybe. “You wanted me when I didn’t want you, because it was safe, and now that I do you’re too afraid to take me. You’re not pushing me away for my sake, you’re doing it for yours.”

Oliver looked stricken. I turned away. I couldn’t look at his face and see what damage my words had wrought, even if I was pretty sure they were the truth. No one wanted to hear the truth so bluntly.

“I’m not a kid anymore,” I told him, even though I felt like one, after that outburst. It was quieter, rueful. I knew I had broken something. “You don’t get to tell me what’s best for me.”

“You’re right, I don’t. I never did,” Oliver said, defeated. “I’m sorry.”

He was going away again for the summer. An island in Greece. Secluded. No contact. He was sorry about that, too.

“How convenient,” I said, and a year ago it would have been snapped, cruel. Now, after the cruel things I had already said to him, it was almost wry.

Oliver chanced a small smile at me. I must have hurt him, if he wasn’t sure I would accept even that. “We’re not very good at talking, are we.”

I borrowed a leaf from Oliver’s book of humorous deflections. It was the best apology I could give. “We were always better at other things.”

“I never imagined I’d hear you joke about that. I might have dreamed it, but never really believed it,” he said. His smile was still as wry as my words, but it was a smile nonetheless, and a reminder that maybe I had been too hasty in expecting him to fall into my arms the minute I expressed interest. After all, it had taken me a full year to come to terms with _his_ interest in me. Perhaps I owed him some time to get used to the idea again.

I shrugged. “I figure if I joke about it…”

“Maybe you’ll want it less,” he finished. “Touché.”

I grinned at him. We were still on the same wavelength, at least, even if we weren’t on the same page.

“I am sorry for going away. Although in my defense, I wasn’t expecting to close out the year with another one of these conversations.”

As far as defenses went, it was a pretty good one.

Would I at least try? So long as he thought about it over the summer. Then we could reconvene and see where we stood. So, we were to part on good terms, then? We were. A pause, rather than a restart. Progress.

“Progress,” Oliver agreed. That, more than anything else he had said or might say, told me he had been watching our restarts and stumbles just as closely as I had. That was reassuring, at least.

And maybe Oliver didn’t feel able to spend a summer with me, just as I hadn’t felt able to spend a summer at the villa without him. Maybe summers were too charged for what we were now; after another rotation maybe we would be in a place to spend one together without it being just a painful reminder of what we had been and weren’t anymore.

So, though it killed me, I let him go.

As much as I would have liked Oliver around so that we could figure out this thing between us, I was not entirely despondent with him gone. Anna had invited Daniel and I to spend part of the summer with her at her family’s beach house in Nantucket and I had jumped at the chance to go somewhere with actual water and no noisy traffic. I had grown to like New York in many ways, but the sheer number of cars on the street was one thing I would never get used to.

Still, I had hesitated – I didn’t want to awkwardly tag along after a couple – but Anna had pleaded, and my resistance hadn’t been all that strong, anyway. Her parents were not too keen on Daniel, she explained, and she wanted me there as a buffer. “Everyone likes you; you’ll smooth things over.”

Nantucket was a little like Italy, except that everyone was rich in a way that said they wanted you to know it. I avoided most of its residents when I could and spent my time swimming or hanging out with Daniel – Anna had quite a few friends to catch up with and entertain, so Daniel and I were left mostly to our own devices during the day until she had exhausted all the how-was-your-year coffees.

Daniel and I shared a room, too, since Anna’s parents believed very strongly in the sanctity of marriage, much to Anna’s irritation. When I asked Daniel if he minded sharing with me, he told me he’d be worried I’d molest him but he didn’t think I had the guts.

“I would,” I protested. “I made the first move with Oliver.” It was only half-true, but Daniel didn’t need to know that, and probably didn’t want to, either.

It was nice to spend time with Daniel again. We had grown apart since the days when he had first shown me around the city, and I had forgotten how much I liked him. He had pivoted his academic focus towards anthropology with a focus on the Proto-Indo-European tribes, and with each passing semester he reminded me more and more of my father. You know, I told him, if he ever wanted to visit Italy, I was sure my parents would love to have him.

The Wrights had an ivory-white baby grand in their ostentatiously-tiled drawing room, because, Anna said, what the hell else are you supposed to do with a room that big and that much money. I got roped into playing it more evenings than not, serving as unpaid after-dinner entertainment for whichever of Anna’s friends’ wealthy parents were visiting. At first, I played classical music, until Anna’s parents began to make pointed comments about her “talented friend, Juilliard is such a prestigious school, and that academic pedigree, with his father… shame Italy is such a Catholic country, but we’ve had a Catholic president now, you know…”

I began to wear my Star of David on the outside of my shirt and switched over to pop songs, and the comments stopped. Daniel looked grateful.

Anna slept next door to her parents, but her room was connected to ours through a shared balcony, which I thought was poor foresight on their part but good fortune on ours. I was tempted to tell Daniel the story of Oliver and I and our shared balcony, but I didn’t think he would appreciate being compared to me in that context. To give them some time alone, I took to wandering the streets of town at night, commandeering Anna’s brother’s old bike and riding along the seawall as the sun set. If I looked out over the water or down at the cobbled streets below my tires, I could pretend that the town bustled in the evenings just like Milan.

I was joined eventually in my nighttime rides by one of Anna’s friends, Emily, who took a liking to me upon arrival, a week after we had settled in. Her first words on seeing me had been “so _you’re_ Elio! I’ve heard tales about you.”

“What sort of tales?” I asked, hesitant. That could mean a lot of things.

“I heard you singlehandedly made two entire freshman classes fall in love with a graduate student and got a girl’s number with the Socratic method.”

Oh, well, yes. Those were both true. And, bless Anna’s tact, the least damning things she could have said about me.

I had initially thought Emily to be standoffish because she never went swimming with the rest of our group, but once we began spending time together at night, I learned that she was just busy; she was a first-year medical student at the University of Washington and doing her best to study in preparation for her second year. Her parents wanted her to choose a more prestigious university, she said, but Seattle had some of the best pediatric cancer care in the country.

“They treated my older brother there,” she said. “He’s a banker now, so he’s the miracle child making my parents proud.”

Emily was good company, and one of the few people I had met in America who could keep up with me on a bicycle. Everyone biked in Seattle, she said, but she couldn’t handle the hills. Nantucket was more her style. “I’ve spent every summer here for fifteen years, so at this point there’s not much new to do. It’s nice to see it through fresh eyes.” I told her about the busy streets of Italy at night, so different from this country where everyone went to bed at nine in the evening, and how quaint I found it that Americans thought of the seventeenth century as history.

One night, sitting on the rocky seawall, bikes abandoned on the sidewalk behind us, I admitted, “I think you’re the kind of girl I could marry.”

Emily laughed. “Woah there, Don Juan.”

I laughed with her. I had only meant… someone practical. Driven. Not a flighty academic like my father, or an heiress like my mother. Someone with a career, and goals. Someone who would challenge me and appreciate being challenged in return.

“I’m not sure I want to get married,” Emily said. “By the time I finish my residency I’ll be thirty, and then what’s the point of all that studying if I’m just going to drop everything and have babies? I don’t think I’m cut out for marriage.”

I wasn’t, either. Or at least not the kind of marriage she was talking about. If I did get married, it would be to someone like Emily. If not… Oliver and I could never marry, but a relationship didn’t need a marriage to be happy. Sometimes I thought my parents would be happier if they were just two people who shared a life together, rather than husband and wife.

Emily would be the perfect fit for me, like my mother and father were for each other. But there was no spark, no draw, not like I had felt with Jamie or like I still felt with Oliver. We would make a perfectly amiable couple, and I would live my life regretting it. I now knew how Oliver had felt.

So when Emily said, on our last night in Nantucket, having climbed down the sea wall and onto the rocks, the ocean stretching out before us into the dusk, “do you want to make out? I can’t go back to school and tell my friends I spent all summer with a cute Italian boy and didn’t kiss him once,” I just laughed and leaned in.

That way, I could tell Oliver I had tried.

I spent a lot of time thinking about Oliver, on the nights where Emily begged off to study or spend time with her other friends – she and Anna were friends by way of their brothers’ friendship and ran in very different circles otherwise. I didn’t mind; in some ways, being alone made me feel more like I was back home. I had been alone most of the time, back then, before I had stumbled headfirst into a half-dozen friendships and embarked on a four-year journey of being surrounded by people all of the time.

I had been wrong about him. It was clear I had never really understood him or the reasons behind his hesitance to push me, the fears that must have held him back from speaking his mind. In the time we had been apart, the uncertainty he had expressed to me in front of the post office the day after we had slept together had transmuted into gun-shyness, and though I still didn’t know who had brought it on, I now knew a taste of how he must have felt.

Some people, like my father, might have said that getting hurt was a necessary part of understanding other people’s hurt. I thought that was bullshit. Oliver and I could have talked things out and been honest with each other without James ever entering the picture, and in no universe would I say it had been _worth it_ to be yelled at just so I could put myself in Oliver’s shoes. But I had been, and I could, and I needed to stop whining about _life lessons_ and decide what I wanted to do with that experience.

Forget it, mostly. Call it even with Oliver and never be that vulnerable again. It hadn’t even hurt that much, in the end, after the initial pain of it. James was a bigot, and he wasn’t in my life anymore. No use dwelling on him when Oliver _was_ in my life and not likely to walk himself out of it after all we’d been through together.

And if he didn’t believe he was _good_ for me, well, I would just have to show him otherwise. I was three years older than I had been the last time I had tried to prove something of the sort; surely I would be three years wiser about it. Oliver and his reservations didn’t stand a chance.

I said my goodbyes to Anna’s family and friends, and Emily hugged me and gave me the number of her new apartment in Seattle. She expected updates, she said; Anna was terrible at keeping in touch. Don’t get married, I told her.

“What, is this an ‘I’ll wait for you till you’re thirty’ thing?”

“It’s a ‘do what makes you happy, not what society expects of you’ thing.”

I was not expecting to be bowled over by another hug and stumbled backwards, only saved from hitting the cobblestones by Daniel’s hand on the small of my back. “Then don’t get married either.”

“Sorry, what?” Daniel said, watching her walk away.

“Long story.”

I had been home, alone, for two days when my mother called me. It was Vimini; she had taken a turn for the worse and the prognosis didn’t look good. She’d tried calling Oliver, too, but there was no answer. He always forgets to change his outgoing message, I said. “He’s away. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

Had the two of us had a fight? Not really. Had I enjoyed my time at the beach house? It made me homesick. Did I like the people there? “I have to make a phone call.”

I told Emily about Vimini, and about sitting on the rocks in B. just like we had sat and watched the sun set over the Atlantic. Don’t get married, I told her.

“What if I meet another charming Italian and fall madly in love?” I could imagine her, leaning against the wall the way I had seen her do over the summer, twirling the phone cord around her finger while she flipped absentmindedly through a textbook, and my heart ached for just a second with more than my grief over Vimini.

“I’ll crash the wedding and when the priest asks ‘does anyone object’ I’ll stand up and say, ‘this woman is going to cure cancer, and she can’t let heterosexual institutions hold her back!’”

“I think you should get married,” she said. “You’re too much of a romantic not to.”

That might be true. But as it stood, the one person my poor, romantic heart had set its sights on was the one person I could never marry, even if he would have said yes.

A few days later, I received the bad news call from my mother. “We tried calling Oliver, too but still no –“

How many messages had she left him?

I wandered the city for a few days, homesick and sad, and ignored calls from my friends. I was glad, for once, that Peter and Gabriele were away; I wanted to be alone with my grief. But my empty apartment didn’t help my mood, so after three days I picked myself up and went to visit Professor Chamberlain.

Professor Chamberlain’s cat still hated me, but she had little rage left over to actually direct at me, since it had all been reserved for her temporary roommate: with Oliver away for so many months, Professor Chamberlain had taken in Paul for the summer. For lack of anything better to do, and partly to give the cat a break, I began taking him for walks. I liked the city better with a dog by my side; if I stayed, I decided, I would have to adopt one of my own. Or steal Paul from Oliver.

I finally gave in to the temptation of asking about Oliver from someone who had known him before I did, and Professor Chamberlain obliged me with the sort of winking acquiescence I was used to from my father, which did not ease my suspicions that she knew the true nature of our relationship back in Italy. The picture she painted for me was not a happy one: easily frustrated, seemingly overwhelmed by his life, in an on-again, off-again relationship with a fellow grad student. “I think he thought he could use your family to reinvent himself,” she said. “Or to find himself.”

He’d found something, at least.

“He always was too serious. You bring out the fun in him, I think.”

Professor Chamberlain told me the date of Oliver’s return when I asked and didn’t ask why, but I assumed that she was in contact with my parents and already knew they had failed to reach him. Still, it was nice not to have to explain myself when I requested Paul for the afternoon, because I didn’t think I had a good one for why I wanted to see Oliver the first chance I could.

It was ungodly hot on the unshaded concrete of Oliver’s front stoop, and I had progressed from regretting my decision to _immensely_ regretting my decision when Oliver himself finally appeared, saw me, and stopped dead, suitcase dangling limply from his hand. He had unbuttoned his shirt as a concession to the heat, and the sight of him, tanned from the Mediterranean sun, hair bleached to the shade I remembered it, brought my heart into my throat and choked off my hello.

 _You’re too much of a romantic_.

“Elio. You’re here. And you… have my dog.”

Professor Chamberlain had told me when he’d be back, I explained.

Oliver raised his eyebrows with an achingly familiar drawl of, “and you thought you’d let my dog die of heatstroke as a homecoming surprise?”

I didn’t want to break the news to him. I wanted to stay there in the sun and drink in the sight of him, to ask him if he’d thought about it over the summer and if he had, what conclusion he had come to. I wanted to press play on the two of us again.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said.

“You’re getting married.”

I wasn’t sure if his joking about it meant he had come to see things my way, or if it was simply his deflecting tactic making itself known again. I wouldn’t get the chance to find out either way.

“There are about fifteen messages on your machine from my mom, and I thought… it might be better just to hear it outright.” I waited until Oliver had sat beside me, briefcase on the steps at his feet, regarding me with wary anticipation, to continue. “Vimini’s gone.”

I watched Oliver’s face, his eyes squinted against the sunlight and his ordinarily shadowed expressions blown bright and transparent. Anguish, mostly. Regret. And perhaps, just a little, relief that I was there by his side.

When, he wanted to know, voice hoarse. A week ago. She had been in remission, but things had gotten bad again at the beginning of July, and everything went downhill so quickly…

Oliver invited me up for a drink before he would let me go home, because “I can’t have you dying of heatstroke on me, either. Your parents would never forgive me.” I understood his not wanting to be alone, but I let him save face and accepted the drink.

We listened to the increasingly dismal series of messages until we reached one from Vimini, instructing Oliver not to worry about her and to be happy knowing that she was happy for him. It was so hot in the apartment that there wasn’t enough water left in his body to cry, Oliver joked, and I pretended I couldn’t see his wet cheeks.

We made small talk while Oliver composed himself and I feigned ignorance of the fact that he was doing it. I asked about Greece and he described his research, and he asked about Nantucket. I told him about Emily, and her brother, and our nighttime rides.

“She sounds nice,” he said.

“She is.”

“Are you going to see her again?”

“I’ve promised to crash her wedding six years from now.”

Oliver looked just as confused as Daniel had, and I didn’t enlighten him. I didn’t want to tell him about our conversations regarding marriage; they felt too private. Oliver and I were not anything that merited him being privy to a conversation like that.

Instead I told him about sitting on the rocks like we had in B. so that Anna could sneak across the balcony between our rooms to visit Daniel, and how her parents had thought of me as a better option until I began teaching her younger cousins raunchy drinking songs.

“Quite the homewrecker,” he said. “Crashing weddings, stealing girlfriends.”

“Breaking engagements.”

I saw him start to protest, to tell me off again for bringing it up, for presuming that we could be anything now, even though we had both admitted we wanted each other and the only barriers still standing in our way were ourselves. I beat him to it. “It was a joke; we don’t have to talk about it. I tried, with Emily, and I’ll try again, if that’s what you want. But I changed your life, and like it or not you changed mine, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”

Oliver shook his head in wonder, equal parts fond and regretful. “How did you grow up without me noticing?”

“You were trying not to think about it.”

“It wasn’t like that, you know,” he said. It wasn’t mollifying, or patronizing, or any of the things I might have felt it to be if he had said it to me back then, or even if he had said it to me thirty minutes ago, before I had seen him blinking back tears and remembered the circumstances surrounding the only other time I had seen him wet-cheeked. Now, it was just a clarification, one grieving adult to another.

We had unpaused, it seemed, right where we had left off. An airing of grievances and hidden truths.

He hadn’t found me childish, or immature – although, he amended, “you can throw quite the tantrum when you feel like it.” He had begun teaching just the quarter before he met me, as Professor Chamberlain’s TA, and he had found in me much more of an intellectual equal than any of his students, a conversational partner more akin to one of his fellow doctoral candidates.

But I had still _looked_ like one of his students, and wasn’t that what all professors who slept with students told themselves? That this student was different, because they were intelligent, or mature, or because they _understood_ each other? In treating me as an equal wasn’t he just placating his own conscience?

“I hated myself for it, for a while. During, and after. I knew what the age of consent was in Italy, and I knew you didn’t think of yourself as young, but I’m an American at heart. I couldn’t reconcile it, especially not when I came back to the states and started teaching again. I would look at my students and think, I would never sleep with any of them. Why did I sleep with you?”

And then I had come to New York, and he had been faced with the reality of me, the same age as his students, in a country where I was now suddenly barely a legal adult. An adult who hated him for the things we had done when I was a teenager.

“I didn’t hate you for that.”

He seemed surprised. “You didn’t?”

“You know why I hated you.”

“I assumed it was only one of many reasons.” He grinned, watery but true, pressing the cool condensation of the glass against his cheek, and I wanted nothing more in that moment than to say fuck his reservations and just kiss him. “You’ve always been so quick to be angry with me. I feel like I’m walking on eggshells around you.”

 _I can’t trust that you won’t be angry with me again,_ I translated. He couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t change my mind, that I wouldn’t hate him for something else. I had been angry with him over James, even as he held me through it, and he had seen that and internalized it.

So. He had resigned himself to yearning, yet again.

Why were we so bad at trusting each other? We must be the two worst communicators on the Upper West Side. It was almost impressive.

“She would be glad we like each other again,” I said, an olive branch. I couldn’t promise him that I wouldn’t ever be angry with him, not in any way he would believe, and even if I did it probably wouldn’t be true. I was too hot-tempered to think our peace would always hold, but I was idealistic enough to think we might always be able to come back to it.

“Well, _I_ never stopped,” he said imperiously. He softened, then, and his smile was not meant for me. “She would.”

No matter what Oliver said or didn’t say about trusting me, I felt confident that things between us were on an upward trajectory. They would never be smooth, but we had successfully paused and unpaused once; hopefully, that meant we could keep moving forward in the future without having to start all over again for a third time. It was a good thing we had leveled up to having these sorts of conversations in apartments instead of his office, Oliver said, because his office would be home to two grad students again in the near future.

Back to the real world, then. Life moved on, and we had to, too.

“And stop walking my dog,” Oliver said. “He likes you better than me now.”

“I’ll happily take him off your hands in two years.” Or, in my hopeless-romantic imaginings of what my future might hold, share him.

“You are a horrible man. Get out of my apartment.”

I went, a spring in my step that hadn’t been there since I had first heard from my mother. Some things, at least, were looking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trauma-as-a-life-lesson narratives are bullshit and I hate them and then almost fell into one and had to write myself out of it, AMA
> 
> Have they made a ton of progress? Debatable. Does Elio at least understand where Oliver is coming from a bit better? One hopes.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey uhhhh so anyway if you want to imagine that Oliver looks like just some other random white dude you are totally and very free to do that
> 
> Anyway sorry for the delay; I wanted to have the next four chapters done before I posted this one (they're not) so I could get them out quickly. I think you'll probably understand why about midway through this one lol, but don't fret, this is still forward momentum even if it doesn't look like it.
> 
> AND ANOTHER THING because this feels important to address directly: if reading CMBYN fic is now triggering or upsetting for you, or even just kind of icky, I will 100% understand if you stop reading this one, no explanation required. I love you all and your comfort is much more important to me than your continued readership ❤❤❤

September came soon enough, and I was introduced for the first time to the man who had always technically shared Oliver’s office, Tommy. I had no idea how they had ever managed to share it before, since Tommy was nearly as tall as Oliver and I couldn’t visualize any possible seating configuration in that cramped room where their legs didn’t bump into each other.

That was part of why he preferred working from home, he admitted, especially given Oliver’s organizational habits, but he had just moved in with his fiancée and “we can’t spend every minute together, you know? She’d murder me before the month was out.” I didn’t know, but the quick, guilty glance Tommy darted at Oliver had me buzzing with questions I couldn’t ask.

He professed to not being great with names and spent our first few interactions calling me “the Italian academic who saved Oliver’s book.”

“You mean my father,” I said.

“Nah, I’m pretty sure he meant you. For months after he got back I’d just hear him muttering _maybe it made sense when I wrote it.”_

That knowledge warmed me, and the way Oliver flushed and looked too embarrassed to meet my eye warmed me even more. Having someone who had known Oliver during the time I hadn’t seemed like it would prove a boon in my quest to snap Oliver out of his woe-is-me conviction that he was wrong for me, and Oliver seemed like he was acutely regretting introducing us.

Tommy also shared Oliver’s taste in shirts, I discovered one afternoon just before the start of classes, when I walked into the office as he was walking out and came face-to-chest with the deep vee of an unbuttoned collared shirt and an expanse of dark skin and firm pectorals.

“How are _you_ hot professor?” I asked Oliver.

Oliver went pink, as he always did now when I complimented him. “It’s because he dresses like a dweeb when there are students around.”

That was probably for the best, I thought.

“Maybe if you followed his lead you wouldn’t have to rely on audience plants to keep your students focused.”

“But then how else would I think up excuses to talk to you?” Oliver said, grinning when I swatted him on the arm. “Just wait and see what I have planned for this year.”

“Don’t you _dare,_ ” I warned him. Upward trajectory or not, I would not sit through another public humiliation for Oliver’s benefit.

Oliver laughed at me. Maybe it would have been worth it, after all, if it meant he would keep laughing like that.

Tommy possessed a wicked sense of humor and seemed to find me equally amusing, which was nice, but I still felt odd being in Oliver’s space with Tommy there as well. It had been easy enough to forget, up to that point, that Oliver did have his own friends, his own life, because he had never let me see it.

“Well, yeah, of course he does,” Peter said. “Did you really think he just wanted to spend time with a bunch of twenty-year-olds? He hangs out with us for _you.”_

I thought that was a little unfair; Oliver genuinely liked my friends. But Peter probably had a point. And Oliver had made an effort to get along with them, twenty-year-olds or not, so I would make an effort to get along with his.

Charlie hadn’t come back for our third year, and with James and I no longer on speaking terms, I spent most of my time in comp lab with Clara. I asked her to hang out outside of class a few times, but she shot me down very gently and explained that she had made her own friends during all the time I had spent ignoring her in favor of James.

She was glad to have me in class, however. “I had to hang out with Charlie,” she told me. “ _Charlie.”_

I had just thought they were friends.

Clara rolled her eyes and went to sit with the new freshman composition majors instead.

I did make an effort to continue spending time with Julia, though I felt awkward around her knowing that she and James were still, as far as I knew, best friends. I didn’t hate him, necessarily; distance and perspective that allowed me to agree with her conclusion that what I had read as disgust had been mostly fear. Perhaps Daniel or Gabriele would have reacted differently if our interactions prior to them finding out had been as charged as my interactions with James.

But it was worth it, I decided, to put aside my resentment over James’ treatment of me and do my best to be friends with Julia in spite of it. I had never stopped thinking that she was too cool for me, but the more time I spent with her I realized that she was in fact the kind of person who would rather watch romantic comedies on valentines day than go on a date or to a party: chill, laid-back, not too worried about much of anything. She had the same kind of calming effect that Daniel did. That was a bit odd, because Daniel reminded me a lot of my father, and I felt a little strange thinking of my father when I looked at a hot girl, but I tried not to let it bother me.

Julia and I never talked about what had gone down the year before, and neither did Rebecca and I. There was an odd, simmering tension between the two of them that I couldn’t place or name, and I ached to ask how, exactly, their phone conversation had gone. All Rebecca would say on the subject was that if Julia really wanted to be my friend, she would “dump that piece of garbage.”

So, naturally, Izzy decided the three of us should hang out, and that she should come along as chaperone and spectator.

Ordinarily, the curse of having an early birthday in America is that you turn twenty-one before all of your friends. For me, this wasn’t an issue, since I had been sneaking into bars since I was eighteen, which Izzy declared to be an affront against the traditional twenty-first birthday celebration. As punishment, she said, we would be throwing me a totally dry twenty-first birthday full of all the _other_ American birthday traditions I had missed out on. I didn’t particularly want to participate in American birthday traditions, but Izzy was a force of nature when she set her mind to something. Peter sent me a long-suffering look, but I knew it was for show. He loved the way she bossed him around.

Unbeknownst to me, Peter, the traitor, had called my parents and requested copies of several photo albums’ worth of baby pictures. So it was with absolutely no idea what I was in store for that I walked into our apartment on the day of my birthday only to be met with a massive, posterboard montage of my own childhood and Izzy making delighted noises over a series of photos featuring me, fully nude, covered in strawberries. I would have walked right back out if Peter hadn’t caught me around the waist and prevented my escape.

The party itself was enjoyable, even without alcohol. Some of the games I had played before, like pin the tail on the donkey; others I hadn’t, like Twister. That one sparked an argument as Anna insisted that Rebecca and Nina be given handicaps as dancers, a suggestion that was not well received. It seemed to me that all of my female friends were reliving a teenage birthday party experience that my male friends had all somehow missed out on.

The highlight of the night was, as it tended to be at this sort of party, spin the bottle. Izzy insisted that we play until I, as the birthday boy, had kissed everyone, to significant protests from Daniel and a shrugged “might as well” from Gabriele. The bottle, however, after playing nice for most of the game, decided that it was not in the mood to land on Peter. After my third awkward kiss with Rebecca, Peter finally sighed, scowled at Izzy, and announced that it was fine because we had already kissed anyway.

Chaos erupted – but not from Izzy. She was a pinpoint of calm among the clamor of voices asking what, why, when, and please will you tell us the story Elio, please, you owe us, being stingy isn’t a good look on you.

I did, mostly to shut Anna up. It worked until Izzy said, “I don’t know, that’s kind of hot,” and then she and Peter were kissing, and Julia said, “no alcohol was Izzy’s rule. Let’s get wasted.”

I woke up very hungover for “part two,” a joint effort by Izzy, Anna, Rebecca and Julia to, as I quickly learned, ruin my life. The club they took me to was not a surprise, though I thought it might have been intended to be one, so I acted plausibly clueless until we arrived. The fact that Oliver was already there when we did, however, _was_ a surprise, and I very nearly turned around and walked out on seeing him.

“Please,” Izzy said, when I hissed at her to ask what the _fuck_ she had done, “don’t miss this chance to dance with your ex-boyfriend. Let us live vicariously through you.”

“I like dancing,” Oliver said with a shrug, when I asked why _he_ had agreed.

Almost immediately upon arrival the girls disappeared into the crowd together, and I knew I would see very little of them for the rest of the night. “I don’t know why they even bothered inviting me,” I grumbled. They had probably just wanted an excuse. Or to set me up with Oliver; even odds.

“I used to watch you dance,” I admitted, leaning against the bar beside Oliver and watching my friends dance along to a song that seemed to be mostly about just jumping up and down. “It made me so jealous to see you with those girls, but I couldn’t bring myself to look away.”

Oliver looked like he was about to reply in kind, but Anna and Julia had taken the moment my eyes had been turned on Oliver to push their way back through the crowd and were suddenly in front of us, grabbing our hands and tugging us onto the dancefloor, and I was left unanswered.

Oliver was as magnificent as I remembered, self-conscious but laughing when five-foot-two Izzy tried to twirl him. It was as if all the years between us had melted away, and just like I had been back then, I was transfixed.

I went to get a drink.

Julia found me at the bar, trying and failing not to watch Anna fulfil what was probably a long-held fantasy of dancing with Oliver. Let her have her fun, I thought; I would get back at her by teasing her about it in front of Daniel and then she would never hear the end of it. He now found her former crush unbearably funny, which irritated her almost as much as it had irritated him when she had had it.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Julia began.

Really? Now?

She didn’t quite seem able to look at me. “I didn’t listen to most of the stuff James said. It felt kind of like an invasion of your privacy, you know? But what I did stick around to hear – it’s him, isn’t it?”

This was not a conversation I wanted to have, with Julia of all people. Then again, maybe Julia, of all people, deserved to have it with me. But there was nothing much to tell. There wasn’t anything there. We weren’t anything.

“Are you sure about that?”

Quite sure.

Julia shrugged, downing her drink, and I could tell she didn’t believe me. Well, tough luck, I thought. She, and everyone else in my life, could cling to wishful thinking; I had resigned myself to rolling with the punches and wasn’t about to pin my hopes on anything until it happened. It _would_ ; I was confident of that, but not quite confident enough to put money on it. “Then you might want to work on your poker face. Both of you.”

“He’s great at poker.”

“Not the game you’re playing.”

Well. That was true enough. He had always been a bit more transparent than he wanted when it came to me. These days he was practically glass.

That, or maybe I had just gotten better at seeing him.

Still, it was harder to worry about it, now that we had finally sat down and talked things through. I wasn’t about to pretend that we had talked _everything_ through, or even most of it, but there was an ease to our interactions now that we had been missing ever since we’d been re-introduced. I felt like I could be friends with Oliver again, no strings attached, no weird history between us. And if I wanted more, which I did, that was still secondary to reveling in the fact that I could smile at him and he would smile back without reservation.

It was practically a rite of passage to pine over your friends, and I found I much preferred it to pining from afar.

Part Two had other consequences as well: Rebecca and Julia somehow came out of the night fast friends, and Izzy and Anna came out of it raving about Oliver’s dancing skills. “At this point you’d be doing us all a favor if you took him off the market,” Daniel grumbled.

Julia called me in a panic a week later – her accompanist had appendicitis and was in the hospital for who knew how long; his appendix had burst on the operating table and he’d developed complications. I didn’t ask why she had called me before James. Sure, I said, I would play for her until he was better; it was no trouble. I was used to squeezing extracurriculars into my schedule after all the time I’d spent with Oliver in the spring of my freshman year.

And, just like they had with Oliver, my practice sessions with Julia spilled over into the rest of my life: we got lunch beforehand, and dinner afterwards, and we went on walks to get her out of her head when she got frustrated by her pieces. It was easy.

I could do this, I thought, midway through a stupid anecdote about Tchaikovsky, the dried leaves crunching beneath her high-heeled boots. I could keep doing this, and I could learn to be happy with it.

As if to test me on that resolve, one Sunday a few weeks into our routine found us seated together on the piano bench, working through a series of tricky runs. Julia had been throwing me odd looks throughout the rehearsal and I was preparing to suggest a walk when she laid her hand over mine on the keys.

This is it, I thought. I can’t be misreading things this time.

“You’re tired,” she said. “We should stop.”

Oh. Sorry. I hadn’t warmed up properly, and I’d had an essay to write the night before; my hands were just a little –

She turned my hand palm-up, stopping my rambling excuses on my lips. Maybe she hadn’t noticed the way I’d turned towards her when she touched me, expecting something that wasn’t to come. “Here, let me. I’ve been doing this for James for years.”

The mention of James threw cold water over the atmosphere I still wasn’t convinced I had imagined, which meant that I couldn’t properly enjoy her admittedly skilled hand massage. But I did take one thing away from that afternoon: that I had been disappointed when those looks turned out to mean nothing. I had _wanted_ them to mean something.

So the next time it happened, when she asked, “what Izzy said, about you liking Meryl Streep –“ I just said, “kiss me,” and she put her arms across the top of the upright piano and leaned down to meet me.

It wasn’t dating, or if it was, it was the sort of dating girls decide is happening and never bother to tell the men they’re with. We were friends who slept together, and if she felt it was anything more than that she didn’t give any indication of it, so I resolved not to worry about it until and unless she did. It was a relief to sleep with someone and not spend the rest of my time agonizing over what it meant.

My friends did not see it that way.

Rebecca and Daniel got into an explosive fight about it, worse than anything I had seen between them even after their breakup. Daniel accused Rebecca of supporting the idea of Julia and I just because she was a woman – “you didn’t even _like_ her a month ago!”

Well, she liked Julia _now_ , Rebecca argued, with a pointed reminder that just because none of us had thought she was worth telling the truth didn’t mean she wouldn’t have been on my side if we had. But she wasn’t about to stand by now and watch them all “pushing him at some guy who broke up with him three years ago! It wasn’t some great love story; it was dumb teenage hormones.” And Daniel was one to talk, she added; he was all cosmopolitan and accepting _now,_ but she remembered the things he said about queers back in high school.

Anna sided with Rebecca. “He’s not our kid, to dictate who he sleeps with,” she said, silencing Daniel, Peter and Gabriele in one fell swoop. “If he’s happy doing whatever this is with Julia, who are we to stop him doing it?”

I was grateful for their support, though I hoped it hadn’t driven a new wedge between Daniel and Rebecca. And something about Rebecca’s defense of me and Julia rang insincere, though I couldn’t say quite what.

When the gathering had broken up and the injured parties had limped home to nurse their indignities, I turned on Peter and Gabriele. “I suppose you have opinions, too,” I snapped.

Peter looked as irritated as I felt. “I get the sense I should keep them to myself.”

All of the tension and irritation bled out of me. It wasn’t fair of me to snap; after all of the times Peter had been right about what I wanted, the times Gabriele had been right about James, I had no right to discount their opinions now. They cared about me, and I was grateful for that. I shouldn’t be angry with them for it. “No, Pete, you’re my brother. I always want to know what you think.”

“You’ve never stopped thinking about him, not once, since the day I met you,” Peter said. “If sleeping with Julia helps give you some space from that, I say go for it.”

“I don’t understand it,” Gabriele said. “Yeah, he turned you down, but you didn’t do anything to fight for him. He’s there, and you’re just fucking around while he waits for you to call him on it. Why?”

I didn’t know. I was tired of putting my life on hold while Oliver and I trudged towards whatever finish line laid in store for us, I supposed. If he was jealous, so let him be jealous. Maybe he would actually _do_ something about it this time around.

Oliver was unreadable when I told him. Or he would have been, months ago, but now I could see the way his eyes flashed with that trademark combination of disappointment and a stoic determination _not_ to be disappointed.

“You said I should try to stick to the straight and narrow, so. I’m trying.” See, Oliver, I thought, this is what you have to live with when you push someone away: they find other ways to occupy their time until you come to your senses.

Although Oliver hadn’t done the same while I had been holding _him_ at arm’s length, which probably said something about the difference between the two of us.

If that was the only reason –

It wasn’t. But it wasn’t like it had been with Marzia, where I had _wanted_ Oliver to know every detail of my time with her. I wasn’t sleeping with Julia to impress him; I was sleeping with her wholly unrelated to him and I had to keep the two separate or it wouldn’t work. And I wanted it to work. Not because Oliver had told me it was the path I should choose, but because I liked Julia, and just because everyone else was making a much bigger deal of it than it was didn’t mean I had to pin all of my hopes on it. I could pine after Oliver and fuck Julia at the same time. There was no conflict of interest.

Clara whistled. “So, you and James had a falling-out, and now you’re dating his best friend?”

“Not dating, just…” I didn’t know what we were _just._ Hooking up, I supposed, to use an American idiom. Friends with benefits. Something both more and less than what Oliver and I had been. I didn’t have words for it. “How do you know we had a falling-out?”

Clara was not impressed by my innocent act. What happened between us, she wanted to know. We had been inseparable the year before.

“He made some assumptions about what I wanted from our relationship and reacted badly when he found out they weren’t true,” I said, which was not in itself strictly true, but I was ready and willing to throw James under the bus. And it wasn’t _untrue,_ either; I hadn’t known what I wanted from him. The fact that I still hadn’t made up my mind whether or not to come out to him before he did it for me surely said something in that regard.

“So you’re hooking up with his best friend to what, prove your heterosexuality?”

“I’m hooking up with her because I _like_ her.”

I was getting tired of explaining that one.

The rest of the semester passed quickly. Julia’s accompanist was released from the hospital, but I had already made space in my schedule on weekend afternoons and was used to being busy, so I converted that time into hours spent in coffeeshops and the occasional lunch with Professor Chamberlain. I had realized that if she was going to be reporting back to my parents anyway, the least I could do was attempt to control the narrative.

She did finally confess to her charge from my parents to keep an eye on me, to which I feigned surprise. “They thought you were running away, coming here,” she said.

I had been. But it had been good for me, in the end. And I had even managed to find and befriend the thing I had run away from, so that had to count extra.

“He’s happier now than he used to be,” she told me. “I think it’s lucky for both of you that you did.”

It was probably time to start calling her Kathleen again.

Now that I had known Tommy for several months and he was finally able to consistently remember my name, I gave in to my curiosity and asked him about Nancy. It was an invasion of Oliver’s privacy and I knew it, but I had spent so long trying to figure him out and I was sure that understanding the reason behind their split would give me some clarity I was lacking. And he probably would have told me on Thanksgiving the year before if I hadn’t stopped him, so really, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t wanted me to know.

Tommy was surprisingly eager to talk to me about it. It was the least he could do for the guy who’d snapped Oliver out of being such a sad bastard, he said; “he called _me_ on holidays before you started inviting him to things, just to make my night a bummer too.”

Anna and Daniel had both been wrong in their assessment of the situation, in the end. Although word on the street was that Nancy had been the one to leave, the actual truth of it – in Tommy’s understanding – was that Oliver had suggested they take some time to think about things before committing to a date and that had not gone over well. _He_ had been the one who was suddenly so gung-ho about getting married, not her, she had said, and now he was getting cold feet?

That was true, it had been his idea, but maybe they had been too hasty and ought to pump the brakes, just a little bit.

Be honest, she’d said. Did you meet someone when you went to Italy?

Tommy couldn’t tell me exactly what Oliver’s answer had been. He assumed that it had been a no, and that that no had been a lie, but Oliver had glossed over that part of the story in the telling. But Nancy had taken his answer much worse than Tommy thought was warranted, and though she had been evasive about what sort of trespass, exactly, had been severe enough to merit calling off the engagement, their mutual friends had taken her side.

I knew what that trespass had been. I knew who had first taught Oliver that people changed once they knew the truth.

Did I know who he could have met in Italy? There was a girl, I said, Chiara, but I hadn’t thought he was very serious about her. Perhaps the lie was that it hadn’t been in Italy at all.

I no longer felt guilty about telling those sorts of lies. Sometimes the truth just wasn’t worth the risk.

I declined invitations from most of my friends for the holidays – I would have taken Peter up on his, except that Izzy was going too, and this time I would have no Emily to save me from the fate of third-wheeling my friends’ vacation. Besides, I had grown to like Manhattan in the winter. It was finally quiet enough, for one, with the snow blanketing everything and the traffic quieter.

It was nice to be alone in the apartment again too, and now without the shadow of Vimini’s illness hanging over me. I had spent two and a half years surrounded by people, and now, alone during a snowy December, I could finally breathe without worrying I was bothering anyone by doing it. My introverted spirit flourished.

I called Oliver on the first night of Hanukkah out of a self-destructive impulse, and we talked as we watched the candles burn down in our respective living rooms. The next night I called my parents, then Daniel, then Rebecca, then Peter, and Gabriele, and Julia.

“Do you think,” she began, hesitant, “that we could maybe… try for real, in the new year? I know you’re still hung up on Oliver, but I think it’s possible to like two people at once. So if you wanted to make this an actual thing, I’d be down.”

She thought so, did she? Who else did she like, then?

Julia’s bright laugh crackled over the phone line. “That’s for me to know.”

I liked the idea of that; of the two of us dating even if we both wanted other people as well. I liked that I could have a relationship and yet not have to give up the way I felt about Oliver. And since Oliver hadn’t said anything against it when it was just sex, I didn’t have any indication that he would verbally object to this new arrangement either.

Could I talk to Oliver first?

“Oh my god, you’re so whipped; it’s like you’re asking my dad for permission to marry me. Knock yourself out.”

On the last night, I called Oliver again.

“Am I the Alpha and Omega?” he asked, dry and fond over the phone. It was almost comforting to be on the phone with him on a holiday; I knew the rhythms of our phone calls. We both felt safer with a tangible physical distance between us.

“No, I just ran out of friends.” It wasn’t true; I hadn’t called Clara or Laurie, but I would rather tell a joking white lie than admit that yes, he was my beginning and my end, and I was just waiting for him to let himself trust I really felt that way.

My parents must be relieved, he said. They’d always been so on my case about making friends, and now I almost had more than I knew what to do with. It was exhausting, I admitted, and I didn’t know how I’d managed it.

I could imagine Oliver’s crooked smile. We were safer over the phone, I reminded myself. Even if I wished I could be there to see it. “You’re easy to love.”

“Are you upset? About me and Julia?”

He had to think about it. Upset? No. Jealous, yes, but he’d been the one to urge me in that direction in the first place, so he didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. He wanted me to be happy.

What had changed his mind, really? Why had the tables turned so that I was once again the one pushing for something between us? What held him back?

“How’s Paul?” I said, instead of the questions I wanted to ask. “Banished to the kitchen so the tree can have his corner?”

“No tree this year,” Oliver said. “Seemed like a silly tradition to cling to.”

That felt significant.

“Why did you end it?” Why had he given up on something that was working, even if it wasn’t quite what he wanted, if he was just going to deny himself what he _did?_

Oliver laughed, quietly, and it crackled over the phone line until it broke in two. “I guess I’m like you. I was tired of lying.”

Then why, if we both knew the truth of his feelings for me, and at least the beginnings of the depth of my feelings for him, was he lying to himself about it? Why were we pretending, first for my sake and now for his, that we wouldn’t both rather be together tonight, not separated by the impersonal static of a telephone wire?

“Have you stopped?”

I expected him to repeat the things he had said to me during our argument, when we had pushed pause and I had hoped we could start again from that point. But what he said instead was, “I’ve never been able to lie to you. I’ve tried, but I just can’t.” He laughed again, and miraculously this one came through clear as though he were standing next to me, bittersweet and fond. “I fully expect you to use that against me the next time I’ve pissed you off. But not right now, if you don’t mind. I don’t think you want me to tell you the truth right now.”

I wanted nothing more than that. But I would not abuse the trust Oliver held in me, would not ruin the calm of this night with questions and big conversations. I would sit there on the phone with him in peace, and I would get the truth out of him eventually.

“Tell me about your classes this quarter,” I said, imagining the relief I knew must be slackening his features. “Should I be expecting a summons?”

Oliver talked until he couldn’t hide his yawns anymore, and even when I bid him go to bed he seemed reluctant to let me go. I understood; our holiday phone calls sometimes felt very momentous, and I had always got the sense that if we had stayed on the line just a little bit longer, maybe things would be different now. “Goodnight, Elio,” he said, finally, when even he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t falling asleep. “Happy Hanukkah.”

Happy Hanukkah, I echoed. “Talk to you next year.”

Oliver laughed. “Quite the ‘later.’”

I let the line go quiet and sat there in the dark for a long time, watching the snow turn to slush on the roads.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the radio silence - real-life projects sort of caught up with me all at once, and that combined with some joint-problem flareups made writing this fic a bit difficult. But I'm back!
> 
> Just to reassure all of you, there is no cheating of any kind in this fic. Oliver and Elio do get kind of flirty in a way that could be viewed as emotional infidelity, but given that Elio and Julia are operating under the knowledge that Elio is kinda in love with Oliver I didn't think it necessary to tag or warn for.
> 
> (And thank you for all of your lovely comments on the last chapter - I'll try to reply to them when I've slept enough to form coherent thoughts)

February brought with it its own problem, which was Julia and James’ Valentine’s tradition. Their friendship had been strained by his tirade against me, and again by her decision to remain my friend and then again by us sleeping together, but she hadn’t said anything that would lead me to believe that they wouldn’t be maintaining the tradition.

I didn’t want to make her choose between me and him, especially not when our relationship was so casual to begin with, so I took it upon myself to announce, on February tenth, that Valentine’s was a stupid, commercial holiday and I didn’t think it worth celebrating. I should have known she wouldn’t be fooled, but I could tell she was grateful for the attempt by the fact that she didn’t call me on it.

“You’re not fooling _anyone_ ,” Gabriele grumbled. Sometimes I thought he was more put out by the fact that Oliver and I weren’t together than I was. I would never understand him.

“As if he didn’t crib that verbatim from stuff you’ve whined about, Gabe,” said Izzy.

Instead, on February twelfth, Laurie and I took a walk.

“You’re sappy,” she informed me. “And I’ll have you know I do actually have a date for Valentine’s this year.” So did I, I pointed out, but this didn’t seem to impress her.

I wasn’t an idiot; I knew my way around Columbia well enough by then that I wasn’t surprised when Laurie steered us in the direction of Oliver’s apartment. It was our tradition, after all. “I want to spend it with him,” I admitted. Laurie didn’t ask me to clarify.

It wasn’t a burning ache, or even a strong desire; I just always wanted to spend holidays with Oliver. It was sort of Pavlovian. And if I couldn’t spend it with my girlfriend, Oliver was the next best thing.

I didn’t think either of them would appreciate my thinking of it that way.

It was just that there seemed to be _something_ about days of celebration that opened doors usually kept shut between us. I couldn’t explain it, but maybe it was the fact that we had met during a kind of in-between time, one long extended holiday from his real life, and we worked best on days that reminded us of that. When Oliver and I had productive discussions, we had them during holidays. That was just how we did things.

Laurie wasn’t privy to that part of our backstory, so she interpreted it as anyone might, extrapolating from the context she had. “Wait just a sec,” she said, and darted up the stairs to ring the buzzer for Oliver’s apartment. I heard her explaining that we were celebrating our not-dating anniversary, and could we borrow Paul?

I had expected Oliver to say no out of principle, after all his complaints that I gave Paul false hopes that his life would always be filled with so many long walks. Even as Laurie tripped down the stairs again to inform me Oliver would be bringing Paul to meet us, I assumed he would be delivered with a dry request to _please_ bring him back in a timely manner.

The Oliver who opened the door was not at all what I had expected. He wore only low-slung jeans, hair a wreck, and a thin sheen of sweat glistened on his bare chest and flushed cheeks. He looked extremely well-fucked. My heart stopped.

But then Oliver coughed, cleared his throat, and rasped, “this is a huge favor, but could you pick me up some cough syrup on your way? I have a terrible headache and every time I cough he barks.”

Of course, I said, stuttering in my confused relief that he wasn’t sleeping with someone, just deathly ill. Lucky for me; not so much for him.

Laurie and I took off on our hunt for cough syrup in a silence that I hoped might last until we had made it back to Oliver, but fewer than twenty steps in, Laurie said, “I really thought he was sleeping with someone.”

I had, too. And I was okay with that? I should be.

Oliver buzzed us up on our return rather than coming to greet us, and when we walked through his unlocked door, we found him slumped barely-awake on the couch. Laurie gave me a significant look. “I’m gonna go. You got this?”

Yes, of course. This was a completely normal situation and I was handling it very calmly and only spinning out about it internally where no one could see. I would help administer the cough syrup and go, and everything would be very fine and platonic. Everything was under control. Sorry about our not-date.

Nothing to be sorry about, she said, staring unabashedly at Oliver’s naked chest. “You’re living the dream, Elio.”

I ushered her out the door before she could say anything else.

Paul left my side in favor of settling into the small space Oliver had left on the couch with a hopeful tail-wag, but Oliver’s hand carding through his fur was evidently too weak to be satisfying, so Paul put his head on his paws with a baleful huff and watched me struggle with the child-safe cap of the cough syrup. Damn Americans and their damn lawsuits.

Oliver watched me, too, until the struggle tipped over from amusing to pathetic. “Give it here,” he said, twitching his fingers towards the bottle in a _come-hither._ I refused to be embarrassed by my inability to open a bottle of cough syrup, or by the fact that his flushed skin and hazy eyes had dredged up several mental images that were probably inappropriate given how sick he seemed to be.

But Oliver, too, fumbled with the cap, unable to grip it properly with his flu-weakened muscles. What followed then was a sort of farcical exercise in effective communication as Oliver attempted to verbally guide me through circumventing a failsafe designed to stop a five-year-old child, not two men in their twenties. At least Laurie wasn’t there to see it; I would never have heard the end of it.

“How long have you been sick?” I asked, pushing my fingers back toward my wrist to stretch the tension out of them as Oliver tipped cough syrup into the cap with shaking hands.

He wasn’t sure; a few days. And he hadn’t called anyone?

“I wasn’t _this_ sick until today,” he said, petulant. It was strange to hear him like that, stripped of all the maturity and poise I usually assumed were just natural to him. It was only when he was at his most unguarded that I remembered those were things he worked hard to maintain, and that more likely than not he kept them up out of fear of what people might see if they fell. It felt like an invasion to be there with him while he wasn’t in control of himself enough to choose what he wanted me to see.

But his cheeks were crimson and his eyes were fever-bright and he hadn’t called anyone, and I couldn’t just leave without making sure he was alright. “When was the last time you took your temperature?”

That morning, he said, so I left him in Paul’s care and headed for the bathroom in search of the thermometer. In the process, I once again stumbled over Nancy’s toothbrush beneath the sink – an odd memento to keep, I thought, since he had gotten rid of the tree. Maybe he just didn’t check under the sink all that often.

“You would have been a cute couple,” Oliver called, still from the couch. It took me several seconds to backtrack and realize he was probably talking about Laurie, and definitely not talking about Nancy.

“How so?” I called back. I wouldn’t have thought Oliver would like the idea of me and Laurie together, even in the abstract. He clearly didn’t like the idea of me and Julia together, even if he probably felt he had brought it on himself and therefore had to suffer through it in pious silence.

“She’s smart. Perceptive. Cares about you.”

He’d just described all of my friends.

“Spoiled for choice, then,” Oliver said. It sounded wistful.

I had no idea what to do with such a misty-eyed, reflective Oliver, so I said nothing in return.

Oliver’s temperature was not reassuring, but not immediately dangerous either, so I told myself there was nothing I could do save make him comfortable and hope that in future he’d be less of a martyr and just _call someone._

Behind me, Oliver had pushed himself into a sitting position and was complaining about feeling sticky and wanting a shower. But on standing, he began to sway and his legs threatened to buckle beneath him, and I was forced to throw myself under his arm to keep him from collapsing to the floor. There was no way he was showering unsupervised.

I saw the light of a question in his eyes. “And I’m not going to supervise you,” I added. Maybe I was the feverish one, and this was a dream. Surely in my right, waking mind I could never imagine Oliver asking me to watch him shower, under any circumstances.

“Fine,” Oliver said, and let me manhandle him towards his bedroom with a mumbled _yes, let’s_ in response to my _let’s get you to bed._

Someone save me from this, I thought.

Oliver leaned on me heavily as we made our slow, shuffling way to his bedroom, which ordinarily I would have had to try not to read into. In this case, though, it was clear that he couldn’t support himself and that whatever his private feelings might be about my hold on his waist, he was in no position to do anything about them. I revised my decision to leave him alone.

I left Oliver to his own devices for a few minutes to grab water and painkillers, though I wasn’t sure they would do anything to help, and returned to find him sprawled face-down on the bed.

“I _know_ you’re not too sick to roll yourself over,” I said, shoving at him, and he groaned but followed my directions. I helped him sit and drink, then busied myself with turning down his sheets and placing pillows behind him so he could sit if he wanted. It was strange to be caring for him like this; I had never had to wrangle a sick person into bed before and I wasn’t sure of the protocol.

Oliver was wearing jeans – I had no idea how or why he had put them on – and clearly uncomfortable in them, so I threw a silent _fuck you_ to the universe for putting me in this position and asked if he wanted them off.

Of course he did. Just my luck.

Oliver was no help whatsoever, and I got the sense that he was enjoying watching me struggle to unbutton them and slide them off his legs. In fairness, I told him, I had never had to remove jeans from anyone but myself before. Oliver shot me a lazy smirk.

“Not quite how you imagined your first time going?”

“If I wasn’t worried about you, I would walk right out of here for that,” I told him. He didn’t drop the smirk.

Of course I was staying. How could I leave, when he was looking at me like that, calm and unguarded, softer and more open than I had ever seen him save early mornings at the villa, his nose pressed to my shoulder and his feet cold against my calves, suspended, just for a moment, in a world where none of our walls mattered? That world had disappeared, shattered when he had left and come back and left again, and I had never been able to find it here in New York, surrounded by the trappings and complications of real life. I would soak this up while I could.

“Hey,” Oliver slurred, blinking up at me with a gaze so intent on my face that the room could have been on fire and I still would only have been able to see his eyes. “Remember when you got that nosebleed?”

You have got to be kidding me, I thought, but given the ridiculous trajectory of the afternoon up to that point, it didn’t seem so far off course, so I helped him into a sitting position against the pillows and sat myself at the foot of the bed, pulling his feet into my lap.

“You’re incorrigible,” I told him, watching his eyes slip closed in exhaustion. I wasn’t sure he had even heard me.

Oliver’s lips twitched up into a tired, genuine smile. “You can call me any names you want so long as you keep doing nice things for me.”

 _I would do anything for you, Oliver._ If only he would let me.

I was too absorbed in my yearning to realize in time, but once the appropriate interval for a response had already passed me by, the secondary meaning of his words slammed into me. _You can call me any names you want._ Had that been a coded request, a double entendre brought on by fever and lowered walls? If it had, would it have been wrong of me to take advantage of it?

The moment had passed, anyway, but I knew I would be agonizing over it long after I left the apartment.

Oliver couldn’t see my internal debate with his eyes closed, so he settled on a new conversational topic as if he hadn’t said anything for me to be debating with myself over. Maybe he hadn’t.

“So, got another fake Valentine’s date planned?”

That stung, a little bit. Julia and I weren’t the kind of people who celebrated things like Valentine’s, but we could have at least spent the day together if I had given her the chance to suggest it. Oliver had been very clear that he wanted me to at least give heterosexual romance a test drive; it wasn’t fair of him to mock me for it now that I was. And I _didn’t_ have a date, which just made things worse.

I shrugged, switching feet. “I don’t have anyone to lie to this time.”

“You’re losing your touch,” Oliver informed me, and at that point, with how far he had slid down the pillows, I wasn’t sure he even knew what he was saying. “No date, then?”

I knew why he cared. I just wished he would say it outright.

“Julia and James are doing their thing,” I said, hoping that would be explanation enough. It wasn’t.

“Still?”

It was their tradition; I wasn’t about to take it away from her even if I was in a position to.

So I was going to sit alone and mope on Valentine’s day? Well, so was Oliver.

“I might not.”

My blood went cold. I carefully shifted his feet off my thighs onto the bed and didn’t look at him as he turned onto his side, one arm under the topmost pillow, regarding me with sleepy curiosity. I was sure I must look the way he had always looked when I said things that could be read as my having moved on from him, but I couldn’t help it. I _hadn’t_ moved on from him, no matter who I was or wasn’t dating, and I _hadn’t_ been okay with the thought that he was sleeping with someone, and I didn’t want him to have a date for Valentine’s day.

“I don’t,” he allowed, after a pause just a few seconds too long to be gracious. “But there are clubs, or…”

His eyes slipped shut again and his voice trailed off into mumbled words I didn’t catch. I couldn’t be angry at him like this. I couldn’t even be jealous, because even if he took someone home, they wouldn’t get to see him like I was seeing him now.

“I’m not so sure you’ll be steady enough on your feet to dance,” I said, but my hand smoothing over his calf with a calculated absentmindedness soothed the sting of it.

Oliver slurred out a, “you’d watch me anyway,” and then he was asleep.

I waited a few minutes longer to see if he would wake up again, but he was out for the rest of the afternoon, it seemed. I tucked his blankets over him and moved to shut off the light, but something stopped me in my tracks.

Oliver had a phone extension by his bedside.

I fed Paul and left before I could think too hard about the fact that he had indeed taken my late-night calls in bed. That was too much to contemplate two days before Valentine’s day.

In the end, Oliver did not go to a club, and I spent part of my Valentine’s day walking Paul because Oliver was still too weak to do it himself. I assumed that I would spend the rest of it moping by myself, as Oliver had so kindly put it, but when I returned to my apartment it was to find Julia waiting for me.

She couldn’t do it, she explained. She had tried; she had wanted it to work, but James had kept asking questions about her and me, and she just hadn’t been able to do it. “I’m sorry. I know you wanted to let me have this thing with him; I made you sit around by yourself on Valentine’s for nothing.”

It was alright, I told her, pulling her into a hug. It was me who should feel bad, I thought. I had driven a wedge between her and her best friend, just because he had expressed sentiments so common to so many people. I didn’t have the luxury of asking my friends to cut people out of their lives just because those people were unkind to me, or even of assuming they would if I did ask. That wasn’t my lot in life.

Julia pulled away. “You smell like wet dog. What _did_ you do with your day?”

“I took Paul for a walk.”

Julia pursed her lips. “Again?”

“Oliver’s still sick.”

I could see in the twist of her mouth that I had miscalculated. It was fine for the two of us to like other people, sure, but to spend Valentine’s with someone else after loudly insisting I _didn’t_ want to spend it with her… I now saw that in the light Julia must have seen it, and it didn’t look good.

I would never cheat on Julia. And moreover, I would never cheat _with_ Oliver: I had been the other woman, in a sense, in his relationship with Nancy, and I would never put anyone I cared about through the strain of blaming themselves for the dissolution of _my_ relationship.

I kept my promises, even if Oliver didn’t keep his. Even if being around him made me want to break them sometimes.

Had I seen him? Briefly.

Our hands had touched, fleetingly, for just a moment as he had handed me Paul’s leash, but the only words we had exchanged were _happy Valentine’s day._ I thought that both of us had probably felt too raw to hold any further conversation.

“You do… want to be with me today, right?” Julia asked, and I hated the uncertainty in the question. I should never have pre-emptively brushed her off.

“Of course I do.” I _did._ Being with Julia was easy, light, fun. Even if I could have spent the day with Oliver, I thought I probably would have less fun than I would with Julia. Oliver and I had too much unspoken tension between us; Julia and I were friends who also happened to be dating each other. “I just didn’t want to make you choose between me and James.”

“I think James made the decision for me,” Julia said, and I thought it was resignation, rather than bitterness, lacing her words. In that moment, _for_ just that moment, I thought that maybe I could love her differently than I already did, if we kept doing this thing we were edging towards. I could love her and love Oliver at the same time, and that didn’t have to be a conflict of interest.

I didn’t know how to say that to her, or even if she would want to hear it, so instead I offered, “it doesn’t have to be a choice. Oliver and I are friends, and you don’t mind.”

“There’s a difference. I _like_ Oliver. I don’t like knowing where his dick has been, but I’ve never been personally injured by him.”

I could probably arrange that, I offered. So we would be even. Julia graciously declined, but she was laughing again, and that was all I had intended by it; she was the most beautiful when she was laughing. I thought about Laurie telling me that you shouldn’t tell a woman you wanted to sleep with that she was _beautiful_ , but it was true, and Julia was sleeping with me anyway, so in this case I thought it had worked out for me.

Let’s do something fun, Julia said, and I didn’t even care that she hadn’t acknowledged the compliment. Something that wasn’t watching dumb romcoms, preferably.

I had a few ideas, I said.

So despite the few days leading up to it, I came out of Valentine’s day feeling quite secure in my relationship with Julia, and it seemed as though Oliver might have been too delirious to remember much of what had transpired between us while I was putting him to bed. Bullet dodged.

I would just have to stop flirting with him, that was all.

The summons, as it were, came a week later. I had half-expected it, in the back of my mind; one of Oliver’s current classes would be covering Heraclitus, and of course Oliver would want a sounding board – and if we were to continue our tradition of ‘casually humiliating Elio via public speaking’, this was the perfect vehicle.

But that, it turned out, was not to be the case.

“Don’t prepare anything,” Oliver told me over the phone. All he required was my presence.

The words, perhaps more honest than they had any right to be, filled me with dread for a reason beyond the obvious. I didn’t believe for a minute that Oliver had invited me to his class just to stand there as some sort of moral support; I knew a minor humiliation lay in my future. No, I was nervous because I also knew, by Oliver’s own admission, that his words _were_ honest, that he didn’t feel himself capable of dissembling around me. If Oliver said my just being there was enough for him, even as part of his revenge for the previous year’s _hot professor_ debacle, he meant it.

It was both more and less than I wanted him to mean.

But, just as Oliver was incapable of lying to me, so too was I incapable of disappointing him. So I showed up to Oliver’s class prepared for nothing except to roll with the punches.

Oliver asked me to distribute a handout, if I would be so kind, but please don’t look at it yet; he wanted my reactions in the moment. His tone, bland and innocent, sent warning sparks up my spine. Reactions to _what?_

The handouts distributed, I retreated to my spot stood awkwardly beside the slide projector. Oliver was moving up in the academic world, I thought; or maybe the university was just upgrading their technology. I slouched in the half-light as Oliver explained that today, we would be focusing on translation and transmission: Oliver had provided them with a number of Latin poems and their accompanying translations. I was there, he said, to demonstrate how greatly two translations of the same work could differ. “Elio will be creating his own translations for us today.”

I jolted. I had been distracted by watching how the harsh golden light of the projector threw half of Oliver’s face into darkness, both sharpening the other half and shadowing it in ways I wasn’t accustomed to seeing it shadowed anymore. He looked closed-off. Professional, unreachable. He had told himself I was off-limits because I reminded him of his students, and now here I was among them, having made myself off-limits by dating Julia. What was he thinking now?

And _what_ was I doing today?

“Unless he thinks his Latin isn’t up to par,” Oliver said, his taunting smile flashing bright in his shadowy face.

Oh, Oliver. It’s on.

Oliver’s grin turned devilish. “To the victor go the spoils,” he promised, and inserted the first slide.

_Seriously?_

“Honest reactions only,” Oliver reminded me, his smile now a full-blown smirk.

“You’re a prick,” I said, on instinct; the fact that I had just done it in front of his students didn’t occur to me until too late. Oliver, though, just laughed. Thematically appropriate, he said.

Ovid. Honestly.

I steeled myself for whatever humiliatingly erotic poetry recitation I was surely about to enter into, but it seemed Oliver was still winding up for it. The first text he had chosen was of Baucis and Philemon, easy enough for me to recite since I knew the story and still uncommon enough that hopefully no one noticed when I made up plausible readings for the lines I couldn’t understand. A kindness.

We went through more of _Metamorphoses_ – the death of Achilles, Daphne and Apollo, the abduction of Ganymede – and for a while, I thought that maybe this was all Oliver had wanted from me after all. Maybe he, too, had decided that flirting with me was inadvisable at this current juncture.

But then Oliver moved to the next slide, winked at me, and turned back to the class, leaving me to gape at the damning black letters projected across his crisp, offwhite shirt like ink on parchment.

“Who can tell me what _else_ Ovid is known for?” Oliver asked, as I stood there and blushed and hoped no one could see it.

“The sex poet!” someone called. The class rippled with embarrassed laughter.

 _I hate you,_ I thought. _I knew you would do this, and I still can’t believe you did it, and I can’t believe I_ agreed _to it._ But a part of me was thrilled. I had missed the sexual tension between us, the thing he had always been so careful to keep out of our interactions. The fact that he was now re-introducing it had to be a sign in some direction.

“Indeed,” Oliver said smoothly, face perfectly bland. “Elio?”

_Bastard._

I stumbled my way through _Amores 1.5,_ throat dry and face flaming, and the whole time, Oliver didn’t look away from my face. At times, I saw him mouthing along with my words as I spoke of _relaxed limbs_ and _youthful thighs_ , his eyes glinting in the dark like a cat’s, watchful and inscrutable. I could do nothing but speak horribly erotic words through numb lips as Oliver stared at them and didn’t try to hide that he was.

Someone at the back of the room wolf-whistled. My face felt feverish with embarrassment and the faintest thrum of desire. It was heady and confusing to have Oliver looking at me like that, after he had so soundly decreed that I was not to look at _him_ like that. And in front of his students, as well, after everything he’d said to me over the summer – what _was_ that?

“Hot professor, meet hot guest lecturer,” Oliver murmured, loud enough only for my ears.

I had no idea how to respond. “If you’re trying to win me some phone numbers I think you’ve missed the mark,” I managed. I could hear the whispers already – but, thankfully, they didn’t seem to be about me. What could possibly be going through Oliver’s mind, to be practically outing himself in the middle of a lecture? And why had he roped me into being a part of it?

Oliver lifted his brows. “I wouldn’t think you would need them, seeing as how you’re in a committed relationship.”

“I –“

I couldn’t answer that. I couldn’t say that Julia and I operated under the knowledge that both of us were hopelessly fixated on other people, and that if I told her that Oliver had watched me with such longing while I recited him erotic poetry, she would probably break up with me on the spot and arrange our first date herself.

“I can’t _believe_ you made me do that,” I said instead.

“Keeps them on their toes,” Oliver said, grinning, a little louder. The whispers quieted, probably waiting to see whether Oliver would incriminate himself further or provide an explanation for why, exactly, he had called in what must have seemed to the class to be a man off the street to talk about Jupiter and Ganymede. “And _I_ certainly couldn’t have done it; I’m their professor.”

Somewhere in the middle section there was a commotion that sounded suspiciously like several women expressing the sentiment that _they_ wouldn’t have minded if Oliver had done the honors himself. I smiled. I had no Anna or Laurie in this class to make wide-eyed faces and reflect my own confusion back to me, but at least they lived on in the voices of others.

“How was I, then?” I asked, at last giving in to the urge to laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing. “Engaging enough?” I knew my translations had been spotty at best, but I thought that perhaps Oliver hadn’t cared so much about accuracy.

“Gripping,” he drawled. “But you’re a little shaky on the dative.”

I left Oliver’s classroom in a daze. I hadn’t imagined the look in his eyes while I had been speaking; I _couldn’t_ have imagined it because I had never seen it before to transpose it onto his face just then. He had never looked at me with such naked longing, not even when we had been sleeping together. Why now?

Was it that I was now safely out of his reach, and he felt therefore able to yearn more openly, if there was no chance – in his mind – of me taking him up on it? Was it that he had committed to being honest with me, after admitting that he struggled to be anything else? Was it merely the same things I had felt in the fall, that it was easier to pine after a friend than an ex-lover?

And furthermore, what was I going to do about it?

I couldn’t tell Julia; she would be immediately supportive, I knew, but she would also be hurt. At least I hadn’t flirted back. But this tension couldn’t hold forever; eventually, it would snap, and like a rubber band, Oliver and I would be flung back together. It was just a question of when.

Daniel called me that night. “Dude,” he said. “ _Dude.”_

How did he know?

“The walls have ears,” he said, and even though I couldn’t see him I knew he had tapped a finger to his ear in one of those goofy, dad-joke mannerisms that irritated Anna to no end but I thought were sort of charming. “Nah, one of Anna’s sorority sisters is in that class.”

Third-party reporting, that was even worse. How bad had it sounded?

“Remember when I thought he was hitting on you through Laurie? Compared to that this is like, a marriage proposal.”

Great.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Julia a lot and really considered writing a sex scene here but I figured y'all might murder me if I did
> 
> Chapter 16 is basically just a continuation of this one because they're too long if I put them together, so I will post it very soon!

I redoubled my efforts to _not flirt with Oliver_. This was not the kind of honesty I wanted from him; if he wanted me, then he should use his words to tell me that. I wasn’t about to dump Julia and leap into his arms just because he had smoldered at me across a slide projector, especially not after he was the one who had encouraged me to go after someone like Julia in the first place. Oliver and I were friends, and the fact that we wanted to be _more_ than friends was not something to talk about.

And then the gay Americans came to town.

I was given very little notice, which I complained about to Gabriele and Peter until they got tired of it and told me to get over myself and just go to dinner with them like my parents wanted me to. I just wished I’d been given longer to prepare emotionally for it, was all, I told them.

“Drama queen,” said Gabriele, the hypocrite.

The bigger problem than my irritation about being informed of their arrival in New York only three days in advance, however, was that they had invited me and Oliver to dinner, and _only_ me and Oliver. Call them and ask them if I can bring Julia, I begged my parents, though I felt pathetic going through a third party; it was too weird if she didn’t come.

I must have imagined the hesitation in my mother’s voice before she agreed. Of course; how silly of her not to think of it. The reservation would be for five.

The reservation, I learned the day of, was at La Côte Basque, which I never in a million years would have imagined I would ever step foot in unless music didn’t work out and I had to sell myself as a high-priced rentboy.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Peter told me, rifling through his closet for something sufficiently upscale. “I’ve seen you naked; you’re mid-priced at best.” He added, laying a shirt-tie-jacket ensemble out on his bed, “you know, someday you’re going to have to start buying formalwear of your own if you’re going to be a musician.”

“Rentboy is looking more and more attractive,” I said, but I wore the outfit and was grateful for it.

Peter looked me up and down with a critical eye. “I don’t know about attractive, but you’ll do.”

I tossed a cheerful “joke’s on you; you still kissed me” over my shoulder as I left, and the door closed on Peter’s laughter.

Julia refused to take the subway in her dress, so she and I split a cab to the restaurant. Once I saw the dress in question, I found I had to agree with her decision.

“It’s my ‘I’m a soloist, but also like, a team player’ dress,” she explained, as I picked my jaw up off the floor. “Glad you like it though.”

She was going to feel underdressed, I told her, but she wasn’t; Isaac and Mounir were just always overdressed. She looked great, even if I was pretty sure that wasn’t what being a soloist was about. I should have told her, she complained; she would have worn a floor-length gown if she’d known. They were so expensive and she hardly ever got a chance to wear them.

“Yeah, but you’ve got great legs. It’d be shame to hide them.”

“You say that now, but wait until I’m on a seven-foot-high stage and you’re in the front row and you can see all the way up my dress.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

I liked that Julia wasn’t afraid to hit me like Peter would have for a comment like that.

As we waited just outside the door for Oliver, I told her, “just so you’re prepared, they’re –“

“A gay couple? I’d sort of gathered.”

“A bit over the top.”

And then Oliver was there, and Julia was rolling her eyes as I instructed everyone to present a united front, and Oliver was reassuring her that they were lovely, and then we were walking into maybe the strangest meal of my life.

Isaac and Mounir were indeed overdressed, though fashionably so – although I had to allow that in a restaurant with murals depicting the French seaside lining the walls, perhaps overdressed was the exact right amount of dressed. They kissed Oliver and me on the cheeks before doing the same to Julia, which Julia whispered was “ _so_ charming.”

“So European,” I muttered, and Julia stood on my foot.

Isaac and Mounir were too busy gushing over Oliver to notice – it was so good to see him; they were so sorry they had missed him the last time; Samuel and Annella had talked about nothing but him; they hadn’t done his looks justice, though. That last one was said with twin winks at Oliver, and then a third and fourth wink at me.

“Isaac, Mounir,” I said, a bit too loudly, “this is Julia. My girlfriend.”

There was a very awkward pause, and then they were equally effusive over Julia: her hair, her dress, her voice – was she a singer? They loved opera; she would have to tell them all about her studies.

“Why did they think I invited you?” I grumbled, as we were led to our seats by a waiter in tails much nicer than the pair I owned, who pushed out our chairs and then waited until we were seated to push them back in. It made me very uncomfortable, but Julia looked like she was having the time of her life, so I tried not to let it show.

I wasn’t succeeding, apparently. “What’s with you and your mood tonight? It was an honest mistake,” she said, under her breath, as the waiter presented us with the wine menu.

They had embarrassed her, I protested, and left unsaid the truth that I was mostly upset because they had embarrassed _me_ in front of the two people who I least wanted to see me that way.

“It was a misunderstanding, Elio. It didn’t offend me, and you’ll embarrass them if you get bent out of shape about it.”

It was just _weird_ , having both her and Oliver there, on a night that felt so much like a meet-the-parents-by-proxy. Especially since said proxies were gay and therefore probably much more likely to approve of me and Oliver than me and Julia, just like everyone in my life save Oliver himself seemed to be.

Of course it was weird, but _Julia_ was handling it, so I should do her a favor and try to be chill about it so we could all enjoy our night.

I tried. And it wasn’t so hard, after the initial awkwardness had passed; Isaac and Mounir were the perfect hosts and had taken an immediate shine to Julia, and Julia, ever the perfect guest, directed the conversation with an effortlessness I both envied and knew I could never achieve.

“What are we, chopped liver?” Oliver whispered to me from my right. I had to agree.

But they were just as interested in Oliver’s work – they had read his book, on my father’s recommendation, and wanted to know if he had anything else in the works. Just a dissertation, he told them, but he had plans to publish that too, eventually. “If they accept it, obviously.”

Finally, the spotlight turned on me. “And you, Elio? You played so beautifully for us when we visited.”

As one, Oliver and Julia said, “he’s incredible,” then turned to each other in surprise and exchanged grins that made me suddenly very nervous of what my future might hold.

Oliver joined us on the cab ride home, and even though he was seated in the front seat while Julia and I shared the back, I still felt as though I were third-wheeling my own two romantic prospects. Julia lamented the fact that she would probably never eat such a fancy meal again, to which Oliver said that when she was a world-renowned soloist she would be invited to so many soirees she’d get tired of tiny portions and pretentious wine names. Julia’s answering laugh was much closer to the laugh I had used to hear from Anna around Oliver than the brash, open laughter I had become used to.

I was so fucked, I thought.

The cab dropped us off first, and I successfully didn’t look at Oliver’s face to see what he thought of the fact that we were clearly at Julia’s dorm and I was clearly intending to spend a least a small amount of time there. I couldn’t handle the possibility that he was jealous, because after the weirdness of the rest of the night I couldn’t be sure who he was jealous of. _That_ was a trip, and an unexpected one. I didn’t think I liked it.

Oliver was pretending not to notice anyway, Julia informed me, after the cab had pulled away from the curb. “I can see why you like him. Think he’d be down for a threesome?”

Absolutely not happening.

It wasn’t fair that I had seen him naked and she hadn’t, Julia protested. Why were all of my female friends so into my ex?

“It says flattering things about your taste.”

The night had been so weird, and Julia was such a good sport and had such an effortless talent for cheering me up, and I couldn’t express to her how grateful I was to her with words. So I took a leaf out of Oliver’s book of cheesy dashing-professor routines and caught her around the waist, bringing her close to me. “ _You_ say flattering things about my taste.”

Julia threw her head back and laughed. She was _so_ beautiful, on the rain-soaked sidewalk in her fancy dress and her dark hair framing the arch of her neck, and in that moment I was jealous of Oliver, because she had smiled and laughed at him and I wanted her all for myself, even if that wasn’t fair to her.

“Do you want to come up?” she said.

I didn’t let go of her. “Do you want me to come up?”

Julia pressed herself closer to me, and there was a thrill to it, being so close to another person in the middle of the sidewalk. Being _able_ to be so close to someone in the middle of the sidewalk, without fear for my safety or what other people might think. Maybe Oliver was right, just a little bit. This was easier. “Well, I might need some help unzipping this dress.”

“We wouldn’t want you to get stuck in it,” I agreed, and let her lead me inside.

You’re right about one thing, Oliver, I thought, back safely in my own bed the next night. I could live this life and be happy, and if that’s the conclusion you come to in the end I won’t fight you on it. But until you stop pretending not to notice when I get out of cabs with girls, until you stop letting me rub your feet and taking my calls at one in the morning, I won’t accept that that’s the right course. Smile at my girlfriend all you want; I’m not over you until you’re over me.

So Julia and I had survived our first and weirdest test, and she and Oliver seemed to like each other, which made my life even easier – even if they seemed, at least in Julia’s case, to be attracted to each other, which could end up making my life much more complicated. And something had changed among my friends, too, though I didn’t know what. Where before they had been skeptical, now Peter sounded almost amused when he chastised me for having sex in his shirt.

“I took it off first.”

“I know you did; you threw it on the floor instead of hanging it up properly and now it’s wrinkled and has cat hair on it,” he groused.

“How am _I_ the queer one?”

Peter shoved me, but he was laughing, and I knew we were okay even if I had messed up his shirt. “Did you at least get compliments on it?” he asked, affecting weariness.

I had; Isaac and Mounir had complimented it almost before they had complimented _me,_ and Oliver had said “one of these days Peter is going to push you out of the nest and you’ll have to dress yourself” and Julia had said “he views it as a public service; I think he writes it off on his taxes” and they had grinned at each other again in that way that made my stomach twist into confused, jealous knots.

So it came as shock to me when, mid-March, Julia broke up with me.

“Is this about Oliver?”

“Maybe a little bit, subconsciously. But I’m graduating in May, and I want to go to Vienna and you’ll be here…”

Why now, then? Why not in May?

I wasn’t upset, not really, though I was a little bit taken aback. Julia and I had always been friends who also happened to like each other in a slightly more romantic way; I hadn’t really expected it to last beyond graduation. I was just confused as to the timing.

“Because I want you to come watch my final recital and not be sad about it.”

Julia always had been too cool for me. Friends, then?

Friends. “But do I have your permission to rebound with Oliver? Kidding, kidding.”

Well, Oliver. I tried, and it worked, and now we’re right back where we were. Is it your move or mine? I can’t tell. But if you don’t make one soon, I’ll have to make one for you.

I decided I should tell those friends I wasn’t in such regular contact with about Julia and me before we all met for Passover. Some were easier than others.

“Shit, dude, I’m sorry,” Daniel said, while Anna vibrated with at least several unasked questions beside him. “Are you okay?”

“I thought you didn’t approve,” I said, ignoring Anna’s increasingly anxious vibrating. I was curious to see how long she could hold out.

“When I thought you were dating her to spite Oliver, yeah. But you seemed good for each other, in the end.”

We had been. But it was nice to get the heartbreak out of the way in time to make a few more good memories before she left. “Besides, I couldn’t have married her, or Emily would have had to crash the wedding.”

“What _happened_ between you two?” Daniel said, imploring, as if this was a question he had been sitting on for months.

I laughed it off. It hadn’t really been anything to write home about, but I liked winding Daniel up; he was fun to watch when he was put out about being kept out of the loop on things. If it had been important I would have told him, but as it was it was more fun to tell him, “a torrid summer affair. You were too busy fucking in my room to notice.”

Anna lost the battle with her own curiosity. “So does this mean that you and Oliver –“

I pled the fifth.

“Since when did you make jokes about the US Constitution?”

I’d picked it up from Gabriele; god only knew where he had learned it. Oliver, probably, or perhaps it was just one of those _American affectations_ he had used to tease me for but now adopted like an anthropologist trying to blend into a culture he found fascinating but ultimately unimpressive.

The tangent had put a cork in Anna, at least, but, like a genie in a bottle, I knew it could only be so long before she was free again. I fled.

“Her loss,” Laurie said, looking much more smug than she had any right to be, considering that her attempt to bring Oliver and I together had in fact been the inciting incident of the strange, winding path which had ended in my relationship with Julia.

“Don’t tell me you still have a crush on me.”

Laurie tossed her head, making her large plastic earrings swing. I still couldn’t keep up with the rapid pace of American fashion trends; all I knew was that Laurie was always at the forefront of them. “You wish. David is cuter than you, _and_ he thinks I’m hot.”

I had met her boyfriend David only once and had immediately noticed the striking similarities between us, but I hadn’t said anything about it at the time and I certainly wasn’t about to now. Clearly I was not the only one who had a type. “I think you’re hot,” I protested, uncertain of how I had made it to that point but fairly sure that if I didn’t argue it I would be committing some grievous sin of friendship with women.

“Sorry, no points for coming to your senses sixteen months late,” Laurie said, shaking her head in mock-pity. “Besides, I would never come between you and Oliver now.”

It shouldn’t have been frustrating that seemingly everyone in my life had reacted with the assumption that I would now come to my senses and date Oliver instead, but since it was in fact Oliver who had put the kibosh on that one, I couldn’t help but resent it a little. “I don’t know,” I said, deflecting. “He said we would have made a cute couple.” He had been delirious at the time, sure, but he had still said it.

“That definitely crosses some weird-teacher student boundary,” Laurie said, brows raised, but she didn’t seem all that bothered by it. But then, Laurie was the person who had asked me out at her professor’s behest, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

“And hiding a letter in his apartment wasn’t?”

Touché, Laurie said. Had I told him?

He was next. Did I have any idea how he’d react?

“Guess we’ll find out.”

The temptation to head straight for Oliver’s apartment and wait for him to come home, since I had casually and unconsciously memorized his schedule, was strong. But I also knew that no matter where this conversation led, it was probably safer for everyone involved if it happened in a neutral location, just in case things went sideways and either Oliver or I needed to make a quick exit. I didn’t want to have to put him in the position of awkwardly asking me to leave his apartment, and I was pretty tired of awkwardly leaving other people’s apartments anyway.

Unfortunately I had forgotten, since I hadn’t spent much time in Oliver’s office over the past few months, that it would not be unoccupied. Fuck it, I thought, as Tommy lifted his head at the creak of the door opening; maybe a third party in the room is actually a good thing. “Elio, buddy, what’s up? Haven’t seen you in a while.”

Not much; school’s picked up, you know how it is. Was Oliver there?

Oliver had just stepped out and would be back any second. Part of me wanted to turn and flee and have the conversation over the safety of the phone, but I was already there I couldn’t think of a good excuse to make to Tommy, or an excuse to ask Tommy to give Oliver when he returned, so I stayed.

Tommy saw me hesitate. “It really will be just a second. Here, do you want to hear the absolute bullshit one of my students wrote about Sophocles while you wait?”

Tommy had an incredible talent for dramatic readings and I was at a loss for what to do while I waited besides stare at the walls and stress myself out, so I said yes. So it was that Oliver walked in on Tommy’s dramatization of a terrible student essay and me in stitches on the floor, halted, and stared.

I knew that look. That was the look of a man realizing, for the first time, how well I fit into his life. It was the physical manifestation of how I had felt the first time Oliver had joined my friends for a meal, when I had realized that we didn’t have to exist in the isolated bubble we had built ourselves in Italy. That we could be us, be who we had been, among other people. It was a revelation and a gut-punch all at once.

Perhaps I should have tried insinuating myself into Oliver’s life earlier.

Tommy cleared his throat. “In conclusion: Kreon’s inability to control his son’s actions feminizes him, placing the masculine Antigone in a position of power over him. In this way, Sophocles cautions us against the dangers of a matriarchy and warns us not to let women have too much power over men.”

Oliver blinked, shook his head, laughed to himself, and, in the time it took him to step over my legs and sit behind his own desk, seemed to come to terms with it. “I’ve always said that Kreon’s tragic flaw is that he’s a feminist.”

“A for interpretation,” Tommy said, underlining the entire paragraph in red.

I could see Oliver settling into the new reality of me in his office without him, spending time with his friend on my own terms, but I didn’t think it had quite sunk in enough, so I chimed in with, “that’s what my piano teacher tells me every time I play.”

“Is it because you’re playing Ravel the way Debussy would have played it?”

It came not from Oliver, as I would have expected, but from Tommy, and the shock of it made me laugh much harder than the joke warranted. What _had_ Oliver told him about me, if he not only knew I liked to improvise, but could also pull two similarly-styled composers out of a hat to make a joke of it? How tired must he be of hearing about me?

It felt like victory.

“What are you doing here, Elio?” Oliver said, sharper than I thought he meant to. He leveled a clear _keep your mouth shut_ glare at Tommy. Busted, I thought. It’s too late now; I know you talk about me to your friends just as much as I talk about you to mine.

“Julia and I broke up,” I said. No frills, no preamble, just the truth. Let Oliver internalize that as calmly as he had internalized my presence here today.

Tommy’s pen froze mid-stroke, hovering above the poor misguided essay. Oliver, standing to grab a book from the shelf beside him, froze as well.

“And you’re telling me because?”

“I thought you might want to know.”

 _Because I thought you might want to know._ Our private code for _because I wanted you to know, because you deserve to know, because I want you._ Because I hope that in telling you this you’ll read all the things I’m not saying, and because I’m hoping against hope you’ll take me up on them.

“That’s a shame,” Oliver said evenly. “You were a cute couple.”

I stared him down. _Break,_ I thought. Show some emotion, any emotion, so I know where to go from here. “I could tell you thought so, from the way you looked at her.”

“A love triangle? I’m _so_ invested,” Tommy said, reminding me of his presence.

“So you thought you’d tell me in my office, while I was at work,” Oliver said, looking only at me. Right. Of course he was not going to give anything away, not with someone in the room who I knew did not know Oliver’s secret. Oliver was not so reckless as I was. I had been wrong to put him in this position to begin with.

I fumbled, searching for some way to dissemble and defuse the situation I had created. “Well, I called your home number and told Paul to pass on a message, but in case it got lost in translation…”

Oliver raised wry brows at me. I couldn’t tell if he approved of the attempt or not. “I’m honored to rank just slightly below my dog in the order of people you told. Dead last, I’m assuming?”

He was, but not for the reasons Tommy probably thought on hearing the question in Oliver’s dry, arch tone. I could see in the way Oliver’s brows lowered and his mouth turned down just the slightest bit that he, at least, knew them.

I shrugged. “I called you first on Hanukkah.”

I didn’t think that would be incriminating, but the way Oliver’s eyes went soft and pleased told me that it was something both more and less than incriminating: perfectly fine to say in company, but much too honest to be said alone. I _had_ called him first on Hanukkah, and I could tell both of us that it was because he was Jewish and alone all I wanted to, but Oliver’s sly smile told me he knew it wasn’t true.

“But now I know you were really just hoping to talk to a golden retriever. He’s not even _Jewish_ ,” Oliver said, putting on a wounded, scandalized tone. He winked.

We were flirting, for real, not like the charged silences between us before, the _I’m trying to be good_ s or Oliver’s unblinking eyes on me in the dim glow of the projector, mouthing love poetry along with me. I was no longer dating Julia, and we were flirting.

My stomach swooped in a sort of giddy panic and words I hadn’t planned bubbled to my lips, but, luckily or unluckily, I was cut off.

“Didn’t expect that plot twist, but I’m intrigued,” Tommy said, jovial and blissfully, heterosexually unaware of what was going on beneath the surface of this interaction. “An inter-species love triangle. Elio, who’s the better kisser?”

“Oh, Paul, no contest.”

I flicked my eyes briefly towards Tommy, then back to Oliver, in a silent question of _does he know, or are we the butt of a gay joke right now?_ Let Oliver decide whether I was flirting back or covering our asses.

Then Oliver said, “please, you wish you knew how well I kissed,” and I realized I had been a fool: Oliver was doing both.

“It keeps me up at night,” I assured him, letting my eyes catch and linger on his lips for just the briefest second on their way up to meet his gaze, brows lifted in challenge. This was his office, his friend; I would flirt only so far as he did. If he wanted to play with fire and potentially out himself – which I knew him to be willing to do, after reciting Ovid for his students – I wouldn’t stop him. But I wouldn’t hasten it along.

Oliver blinked, swallowed, and opened and shut his mouth like he had been about to lick his lips and realized that was too damning a gesture. He cleared his throat.

“Alright, keep your boners to yourselves,” Tommy said, rolling his eyes. “Oliver, show Elio that ridiculous translation of Homer one of your students did.”

Oliver and I exchanged helpless glances as he produced the translation in question, and as I perched on the arm of his wooden desk chair, my thigh brushing his shoulder as I listened, that helpless feeling only grew.

We _had_ crossed a bridge, back in August, and I had been safely guided from the shore by Julia’s presence, but now I had found myself lost in a woods without her, and all I knew was that we were in uncharted territory and that things were gaining speed.

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to pump the brakes.

The second shocking thing that happened in March was that James approached me in comp lab to ask if I would serve as soloist in his senior composition. So shocking, in fact, that I couldn’t find the words to turn him down before he said anything else. Was it because I had dated Julia? Was it because we weren’t dating anymore? Did he feel like I’d returned her to him?

“Do you really think I’m that much of a misogynist?”

Well, he was a bigot in other ways, so it wasn’t so far outside the realm of belief.

James looked like he was ready to start in on me again, and I knew I had upset him, but we were in the middle of class, and besides, I wasn’t about to stick around if he ever did try anything like that again, and he knew it. “It’s because I want the best, and you’re the best.” He winced.

I was reminded of the year Oliver and I had spent trading accidental innuendos, and suddenly it was laughable that James and I could be in the same place, a year out from a spectacular split and seemingly with no way to mend it. The difference now was that I didn’t particularly care if we did or not.

“I’m not,” I said.

“Well, I’m still asking you, so take it or leave it,” James said, throwing up his hands in frustration. “You don’t have to be difficult about it.”

Oh, I absolutely did.

I said I’d think about it and then proceeded to leave him hanging for four days.

I expected Peter and Gabriele to be shocked and offended on my behalf, but what Peter actually said was, “yeah, he asked us too.”

What kind of upside-down world had I found myself in? More importantly, what had they answered? Surely neither of them would go behind my back like that; unlike Julia, Peter had immediately dropped James once I had, and Gabriele had never liked him in the first place.

“I said I’d only do it if he asked you and he said he already had,” Peter said.

“I told him to shove it,” said Gabriele. “And then he asked if I’d ask you to at least consider it and I told him to go fuck himself.”

Julia, at least, was appropriately shocked when she called me and informed me that word had gotten back to her through Rebecca – I still wasn’t exactly sure what the nature of their friendship was but had always found it easier not to ask – and wanted to know what I planned to do about it. She was his friend, I said; what did she think?

“I think it wasn’t fair of him to ask you. But I think he’s right that you would kill it.”

So, it seemed I would have to make the decision on my own. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do; I hadn’t thought much about James in the past ten months save briefly around Valentine’s. That was an embarrassing chapter of my life that, while it made me cringe to look back on it, didn’t have much impact on life as it was in the present. It had served as a catalyst for me and Oliver to talk, and it had ended a confusing and painfully intense friendship, and it was behind me now.

But was James? Could I spend time with him, alone in a small practice room, and not feel angry and hurt? Could I accept his praise and pretend that he didn’t feel all the things about me he’d said he felt? This wasn’t an apology.

“But it’s not not an apology,” Peter said.

Well, fuck it, then.

James stopped me as I was headed out the door after our first rehearsal, hand hovering over my elbow like he was afraid to make contact with me. How pathetic, I thought. We didn’t even have the history between us that Oliver and I did to make the hesitation seem reasonable. “We’ll never be friends,” he said, looking intently at my forearm rather than my face, “but you’re a damn good pianist.”

“I never asked for anything more than friendship from you.”

“I know,” he said, quiet and ashamed. _No points for coming to your senses a year late,_ I thought. “But I can’t give you that either.”

I shrugged him off, trying and failing to hide my smirk when the motion brought his hand into contact with my arm and he flinched. Either he’d get over it or spend the rest of our time together uncomfortable. Secretly, I hoped for the latter. “That’s okay. You’re not worth the effort.”

I left him, stunned, in the doorway. _That_ was a satisfying note to end on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE RETURN OF JAMES
> 
> I know we all have mixed-to-negative feelings about James BUT Elio is finding closure and we should all applaud him for that


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back up to 21 chapters babeeeey! We went down to 20 for a minute but we're back.
> 
> I really toyed with making this chapter and the next one long chapter but that would have been TOO long and also I think there's a pretty solid thematic break between them. So you get two very short chapters, but because they were originally one chapter I will post chapter 17 later today (not right away for the sake of those of you who get email alerts, but definitely within a couple hours).
> 
> Anyway this chapter is called "Elio being queer in public part 1"

With Julia and I no longer together, the _thing_ between Oliver and I that I had first named in his classroom with him loomed ever larger. Our every interaction seemed poised on the edge of something more significant. How long could we hold out?

It made me nervous around him, in a way I hadn’t been since the first weeks of our acquaintance. It wasn’t the nervousness of later, when I hadn’t known where we stood but knew it was nowhere positive; it was the nervousness of anticipation, of _becoming,_ of what-might-be.

Oliver felt it too, I thought. He became… _delicate_ around me, was the only word I could think for it. Careful never to flirt too hard or look too long. Afraid any misstep might send us careening back any number of months, probably. I thought he might never not be afraid. But I knew myself, finally; I knew what I wanted and what I was willing to endure to get it. He couldn’t scare me off. Ironically, I might now scare _him_ off if I was too forward about it.

I wasn’t sure how to move past that.

The year hurtled towards its close, and I waited anxiously for whatever final conversation Oliver and I might have _this_ May. It was tradition, after all. But traditions can be broken.

At Passover, Daniel dropped the bombshell that he would be graduating in three years. That was why he hadn’t been around as often; he had been cramming two years’ worth of classes into one. He and Anna were moving to Germany; he had applied to a graduate program in linguistics and she would “figure it out when I get there,” she said. “I’ve got a leg up on Daniel because I already speak the language.”

Peter, Gabriele and I exchanged glances but didn’t say anything about the American belief that four years of high school German could prepare one to live in a foreign country.

If they were going to be in Europe, I offered, they were welcome to visit my parents.

“Well,” Peter said, “since we’re talking about life changes, Izzy and I are going to move in together.”

“We’re going to break up when we graduate, so we’re checking all the boxes,” Izzy said. She was trying for Broadway, which I had always known, but Peter had tentative, half-formed plans to go back to France, which I hadn’t. How had I been so busy that I hadn’t noticed my best friend planning such a huge thing?

I offered my congratulations to Daniel and Anna and my confused condolences to Izzy and Peter, but I spent the rest of the night feeling unsettled. I was happy for them, of course I was, but it was odd to spend time with people who had such concrete plans for their future when I still had no idea what I wanted to do with mine. The only constant in my dreams of the next few years was Oliver, but I didn’t even know if that was feasible. I might spend my whole life chasing after him and being rebuffed, or we might continue down this road we were on and spend forever just missing each other.

I begged off early, saying my goodbyes and giving another round of general congratulations before I could escape down the stairs of Anna and Daniel’s fourth-floor walkup and onto the blessed hubbub of the street. Behind me, I heard Oliver making excuses everyone pretended to believe.

How funny, I thought, that these days the constant hum of activity soothed me. Only three years ago I had found it grating and alienating; now, it was familiar as a lullaby. Peter and Daniel might be New York boys, even if they planned to leave it, but somehow without my noticing I had become one too.

Oliver caught up with me easily, but if I were honest with myself, I hadn’t been walking that quickly. “Subway’s that way.”

“I know. Just thought I’d take a walk.”

“All the way to Juilliard?”

“It’s a nice night.”

Oliver slowed his pace in a clear attempt to get me to slow mine, but I stayed constant. I didn’t want to stop and talk about my feelings, especially not with the person who always seemed to be at the center of them.

Oliver wasn’t deterred, choosing instead to walk backwards in front of me in what ended up being more of an awkward jog than the suave maneuver I was sure he had intended it to be. “Are you alright?” he asked, peering at my face with as much concentration as he could while simultaneously navigating the cracked sidewalk.

He looked ridiculous, like an oversized puppy begging to play or a cat winding his way through my legs, tripping me up and forcing me to change direction.

I was. There was nothing wrong, really; I was just being maudlin and self-pitying. There were good things happening in my friends’ lives, and I just needed some time to get over the fact that I would miss them. The rest of it, the anguished musings about Oliver that had driven me from the building – that was all just the usual stuff. Nothing to write home about.

I settled on something close to the truth. “I’m tired of people leaving.”

“Who’s leaving?” Oliver said, frowning, and then cursed as he stumbled over a jagged edge of the pavement. I took pity on him and slowed to a more reasonable pace so that he could walk beside me, partly because that meant I didn’t have to look him in the face any longer.

“Daniel. Anna. Peter. Julia. You, someday.”

Oliver stumbled again, but this time there was nothing tripping him except his own surprise at hearing himself included in that list. “Why do you think I’ll leave you?”

I was just as surprised by his words as he had been by mine, but only because it seemed so obvious to me. “Because you always do.”

It wasn’t true, but it _felt_ true, in the way that sad, self-pitying things always do when you’re in a sad, self-pitying mood. We were coming up on yet another summer, slate wiped clean of Peter and James and Julia, and the thought of starting our yearlong cycle over again was exhausting. If he was going to keep leaving me, holding us back from the conversations I _knew_ we could have, at least it should be out in the open.

“What?”

“You’re always leaving, Oliver. We’ll be fine, and then I’ll ask you to promise anything, even friendship, and you run away. And then you come back and we pretend it never happened and start the whole thing over again.”

I saw him internalize the words, take them into himself and measure them against his own understanding of who we were. His response, then, was not wounded, as it might have been if he thought them unfair, but it was tentative, as Oliver pieced together how his and my perceptions of our relationship differed.

“Is that what it looks like I’m doing?” He shook his head, more violently than the denial warranted, and I ached with the urge to smooth his disheveled hair back into place. “I don’t – I was giving you _space._ I want you to enjoy college, not spend it saddled to a man seven years older than you when you should be out having fun.”

I gaped. Could it be possible that Oliver was so caught up in his own martyrdom that he had missed the fact that I _was_ having fun; that I had tried to _include_ him in that fun; that having him in my life in fact enriched it? Did he really know me so little after all? I _wanted_ to be saddled with him. He knew that; he had to. I was happy with him.

“You were happy with Julia, too,” he argued, as if those weren’t two completely separate points. As if I were still the child I had been, pinning my entire being on him, instead of the adult I was now, someone with friends and a life, someone capable of having multiple interests at once.

And yet. “And every time I saw you, I wanted you. And every time, you ran, you _run –“_

Oliver spun and grabbed me by the shoulders, so sudden and desperate that I was shocked into silence. “You want to know why I leave? You _push_ me away, Elio. You say you want me, as a friend or as something else, but if I don’t give you exactly what you want, you shut me out. What am I supposed to do? Chase after you? You’d hate that too.”

His words hurt me, but mostly because they were true. I had always controlled the pace of our relationship, even from the start, and while I had matured in many ways over the years we’d known each other, I was still, in some sense, behaving like that child. The one truly mature thing I had done in that respect was date Julia, and even then I had taken a mean sort of satisfaction in knowing that it bothered him. I wanted him all mine, or not at all, and I wanted him to feel the same.

Selfish of me. Probably not the healthiest mindset, either. But he was wrong that I wouldn’t want him to chase after me. I didn’t like to be caged, true, but being chased would mean he _wanted_ me enough to do it anyway. I just wanted tangible proof.

I couldn’t look him in the eye and admit those things.

“I want to mean more to you,” I said, clutching at his shirt and resting my forehead against his chest. “I hate existing in this in-between state.”

Oliver’s breath hitched, chest rising and falling once beneath my head. “Elio, you mean –“

“Hey, what’s going on over there?”

The voice was male, rough, drunk, and worryingly, dangerously suspicious. I started to pull back, ready to spring apart and pretend this were any sort of conversation other than the one it was, but Oliver tightened his hold on my shoulders and answered, without missing a beat, that I had just been broken up with and that he was trying to talk me out of going back inside and begging her to reconsider.

Inspired, really.

The owner of the voice came closer, and I did my best to look heartbroken and dejected. Not too hard, all things considered. “Aw, no, man, you can’t do that,” he said to me, chiding but mercifully pacified. “You can’t let women see they’ve hurt you. Gotta act like you don’t care about her; make _her_ beg _you_ to take her back. You look pathetic, dude.” Then, with a clap on Oliver’s back and a, “good man, keep doing the lord’s work,” he had passed us by.

I couldn’t help it; I started to laugh. We had been fools to have that conversation on the street where anyone could hear us. We _both_ knew better.

My laughter was infectious, it seemed. Oliver grinned ruefully down at me, tension dissipated. “We’re idiots, aren’t we?”

“Pathetic,” I agreed.

“You’re not,” Oliver said, all at once sober and earnest. “It’s not pathetic to want to mean something to someone. I just thought you already knew you did.”

I had, or I had guessed it, but extrapolating from longing looks and hearing it actually said were two different things. But maybe if he said it again…

Oliver made a face. “Don’t make me say it.”

Not good enough. I wanted him to display that honesty he claimed I compelled from him. I wanted to hear from his lips what I had so far only heard in the silences of what he didn’t say.

I wanted him to break.

In what I knew to be a complete and utter gamble, I leaned in as close as I dared, letting my arm brush against his and feeling the gooseflesh left in its wake, and whispered in his ear.

_I want you to fuck me._

Oliver squeezed his eyes shut, exasperated or pained or regretful – in any case, not the reaction I wanted. “Elio, I can’t do this right now.”

“Later, then.”

“Don’t do this to me.”

“If not later, when?”

I wasn’t sure exactly what I had expected to come from that gambit, but it probably hadn’t been to be dragged by the arm into the nearest alleyway and pushed against the bricks, bracketed in by Oliver’s body and Oliver’s forearm braced against the wall above my head.

I grinned up at him. _This_ was interesting. “Against a wall? Scandalous.”

Oliver huffed a disbelieving laugh. “After all that –“

“Makeup sex is the best sex,” I said, echoing Izzy’s frequent proclamation – though as far as I could see she and Peter never fought – trailing my hands down Oliver’s free arm and up his chest, toying with the collar of his shirt. It was buttoned up further than usual; couldn’t have that. Oliver watched, transfixed, as I loosened the top few buttons, before managing to shake himself out of it.

“We aren’t fighting, we’re – disagreeing,” he said, shaky but determined. “An – an ideological disconnect – _you_ are the bane of my existence.”

I ceased unbuttoning but didn’t move my hand, caressing the sliver of exposed skin with my little finger. Oliver sighed. “You are such a – I’m _trying_ to be _good.”_

Don’t, then. Fuck me. Right there. Come on; I dare you. Fuck me, or _show your hand._

“You’re going to get us _murdered_ ,” Oliver said, incredulous. “Or arrested.”

I knew when to give up. Teasing wasn’t the way to go about this; I should have known. Oliver was at his most honest late at night, or over the phone, or in his own apartment – somewhere he felt safe and in control. I let him off the hook. “Good thing I’ve got a cop kink.”

And just like that, the moment was over. Oliver rested his head on his forearm, laughing in ill-disguised relief. “Go home, Elio. Sleep it off.” I wasn’t drunk, but I let him have the lie. “ _Later,”_ he added, before I could open my mouth to say anything else, and with that enigmatic farewell, he was gone.

I walked past three subway stops before getting on.

Was I disappointed, really? I had been teasing, sure, but behind every jest is at least a kernel of truth. Was I glad he hadn’t taken me up on it? Had I even wanted him to? If we rushed into things, and it didn’t work – and there was no guarantee it would, even if I felt certain of it right then – there would be no third chances. My heart couldn’t take that and neither could his. If I went back to Italy, or he accepted a position somewhere else – perhaps it was better to take things slowly.

I just didn’t _want_ to.

Most of my free time over the following month was spent rehearsing, mostly with Peter and Gabriele. I wasn’t pushing Oliver away, not like he claimed I did, I was just… taking time to think. Making sure we were on the right trajectory. And I knew that whatever happened between us, things were still going to change after the school year was over, and I wanted to soak in what I had while I could.

I didn’t invite Oliver to Julia or James’ performances, but I didn’t _not_ invite him, either. He knew when they were, I reasoned; if he wanted to come, he would come.

He came to both.

I didn’t know why I was surprised.

Oliver presented Julia with a bouquet, the showoff, and accepted her thanks and her lamenting that “Elio told me not to sleep with you, so I guess I’ll have to content myself with flowers” with aplomb.

“A missed opportunity,” he agreed.

I hadn’t brought flowers – it seemed a bit gauche, since we had broken up only months prior – so I just hugged her, informed her that she was going to take Vienna by storm, and extended the invitation on my parents’ behalf that if she ever wanted to spend a week in Italy, they would be thrilled to have her.

Julia frowned. “They don’t hate me for breaking up with you?”

“I love you, so they’ll love you,” I said firmly. Privately, I thought my parents had never really believed we were dating at all, but I wasn’t about to say that.

Julia smiled at me, so fond and so beautiful that for a flash I remembered why I had loved her in the first place. I understood why she had decided to end things when she had; I couldn’t have borne it if this were the moment it all ended. “I hope you find someone to make you happy,” she said, eyes darting to Oliver.

I didn’t think that one was in the cards.

“I wouldn’t be so sure – no, don’t turn around.” Julia shook her head. “If you could see how he looks at you…”

“How?”

“You know how.”

I did. It was the way Oliver had looked at me across that slide projector, or in front of the tree at Rockefeller while my parents acted young and in love beside us, or as I sat on his front stoop with his dog in the August heat. It was the way he had looked at me in his office, uncaring if Tommy saw. He might not think I could see it, but Oliver was always looking at me _like that._

“Indulge me.”

Julia rolled her eyes, still the woman I had fallen for and the woman I would always be glad to call my friend. “Like you used to look at me. Like you’ve always looked at him.”

I had loved her, as much as anyone can love a person they’ve only dated for a few months. I always would, a little, and even more so for the fact that she had loved me even knowing I couldn’t give her all of myself. I didn’t deserve her.

Something of that must have bled through into my expression, because Julia rolled her eyes. “You’re a sap,” she informed me. “If you miss me that much, come visit.”

I would, I promised. After all, someone in the front row had to appreciate her knee-length gowns.

I hadn’t _really_ been surprised to see Oliver at Julia’s recital, but I _was_ surprised to see him at James’. “He’s _so_ gone on you,” Peter said, by way of explanation.

Oliver congratulated me and Peter, carefully sure to be equally effusive over both of us under James’ suspicious gaze, which Peter accepted with a good natured eyeroll and a wink in my direction. Then he turned to James.

“Beautiful work. I’ll expect to see your name on the big screen soon.”

James looked like he didn’t know whether to be suspicious or ashamed, but he settled on a mumbled, “Elio played it well.”

Oliver beamed.

“ _So_ gone,” Peter whispered. He hung back as Oliver and I headed for the exit, caught up in conversation with another well-wisher, though I suspected he had done it on purpose.

Oliver wrapped me in a side hug, leaving enough space between our bodies that it could have been a platonic, masculine display of brotherly affection if anyone questioned it. This was not to be a repeat of our conversation on the sidewalk outside Daniel and Anna’s apartment. “I’m so proud of you.”

He’d already said. Yes, but not for that.

Then why?

“He stomped on your heart, and you made him look so good up there.”

Well. Yeah, I had. That was a pretty good feeling. I hadn’t _needed_ to do it, though. “My heart’s taken a few beatings at this point.”

Oliver jostled me, a friendly rebuke, and ruffled my hair. “So dramatic. I just bruised it, a little.” He’d just – I had cried for _weeks_ after he left. And I’d cried for, what – twenty minutes over James? “That’s called growth.”

Peter, conversation over, bounded up behind us to sling long arms around both of our shoulders. He’d hit one of those mid-college growth spurts and was now of a height with Oliver, much to his chagrin, and Gabriele and I had developed a very specific long-suffering silent communication system to deal with his lamentations that none of his pants fit him anymore. “Let us celebrate!”

“What are we celebrating?” I asked, pushing down an uneasy sense of déjà vu. We were a year out from my disastrous _celebration_ with James, and I had just closed the door on that relationship forever. Surely that was worth celebrating in and of itself. No need to dwell on old traumas on a day that _should_ be one for celebration.

Peter agreed. “You played that asshole’s music and knocked it out of the park and now you never have to speak to him again.”

What was _he_ celebrating, Oliver wanted to know.

“You didn’t deck him on the spot.”

We went for drinks, which Peter insisted Oliver should pay for and promised that when we were world class musicians and he was still a penniless academic, we’d spot him in return. “But right now you have a job and we’re in debt, so pay up.”

Oliver protested that he’d be in debt for the rest of his life. Cheers to that, Peter said.

A few drinks in, just when I had stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop, Peter put his elbows on the table, leaned forward, and said, “alright, tell me your story. I’ve lived through three years of sexual tension and lingering glances; I deserve this. And for the record, Elio, you undersold his dick.”

“I _knew_ it was an insult,” Oliver said, sending me a half-hearted glare.

It was the memory of waking up in his bed and walking out into his kitchen, of stumbling through early-morning pleasantries and of leaving still laughing, that drove me to smile back at him and to finally, after three years, give in to Peter’s curiosity.

So Oliver and I traded anecdotes, filling in the gaps of each other’s recollection, saying out loud for the first time things we had always left unsaid between us for Peter’s attentive audience. And it was cathartic, in a way. The whole thing had been ridiculous, in hindsight, and now that we weren’t so caught up in the eye of the storm it was easier to see that. Part doomed love story, part farce – that was the way Oliver and I did things.

And it confirmed one thing for me, listening to Oliver be more honest in front Peter than he maybe ever could have been between just the two of us: I wasn’t the same person I had been, and I didn’t love Oliver in the same way I once had, but I did still love him.

It was alright, too, if Oliver never loved me back the way he had before. I could see the way he lit up when he spoke of me, the look in his eyes Julia had told me not to turn around and see, and I knew that Oliver still loved me too. Just differently. And no one could take that from us, not even Oliver.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't remember when I posted chapter 16 but I'm about to leave this coffeeshop, so here is Elio being queer in public part 2, or "trying to convince people we're NOT dating"
> 
> Some mild homophobia in this one, specifically from family members, so proceed with caution!

Graduation came too soon. Most of us trooped over to Columbia to wish Daniel and Anna goodbye, which embarrassed both of them to no end. As far as I could tell, that was Rebecca’s main reason for coming.

“Thought we’d have you with us for one more year, man,” Peter said, clapping Daniel on the back to disguise the fact that he was blinking back tears. The way he wore such fragile emotions on his sleeve never failed to baffle and impress me. _I_ hid my watering eyes in my sleeve.

“Me too,” Daniel said, “but on to bigger and better things, you know?” Maybe he’d write a book, he added, with a wink in my direction.

I laughed, and if it was a little choked, at least Peter was my only witness. “Thank you.”

For many things, but maybe most for inviting me to that bar and for everything after it. And yes, I knew that he had only invited me so that he had an excuse to invite Anna, but it had worked out pretty well all the same. For both of us.

Anna cried and hugged me, and as she did, whispered in my ear, “fuck him for me.”

“If it happens, I’ll think only of you,” I promised.

“As you should.”

Watching my Juilliard friends graduate was stranger. Julia, lovely as ever, kissed me on the cheek and thanked me for taking a break from pining long enough to date her. I replied in kind, though she still refused to tell me who, exactly, had been Oliver’s counterpart on her side.

“Fuck him for me, will you?” she said.

“Anna already called first dibs.”

Then I’d just have to do it more than once, then, wouldn’t I?

I didn’t _want_ to bid James congratulations, necessarily, but with Julia by my side and after helping him with his senior composition, I felt I had to. Our handshake was as stilted as I had expected, as was his, “good luck.”

I turned to leave, Julia, or no, but something in me, the desire to be the bigger person or to prove to myself that he no longer held any power over me, kept me in place long enough to say, “you too.”

“If I score a movie for Hugh Grant I’ll dedicate it to you,” James said, with that same crooked grin I had first been so entranced by. We could have been friends, I thought. It could have been a beautiful friendship, if you weren’t such a dick.

“No you won’t.”

“I won’t,” he allowed, “but I’ll spare you a passing thought.”

See, I wouldn’t even do that. Wouldn’t have it any other way, he said. A satisfying enough end, I thought.

Peter moved out in July, and when he did, he left me the clothes he had recently grown out of. I only cried a little.

“You should give me that blue shirt of Oliver’s in exchange,” he joked.

“Remember when you got mad at me for leaving your shirt on Julia’s floor?”

Got it, he said, never mind.

In his place, we acquired a new roommate, a third-year violist named Sean. “Kind of a downgrade,” Gabriele said, which Sean took with a violist’s good humor. They’d done quartets together, Peter assured us; he was chill.

Unfortunately, many of those quartet rehearsals were held in our apartment, which meant that Gabriele and I had to find other places to spend our time. We wandered the city like the young hooligans we were – and now looked, since Gabriele had dared the both of us to get our ears pierced. “We can’t get just one, or people will think we’re gay,” he told me, to which I pointed out that I _was_ gay, or half-gay. “Well, you can’t get half an ear pierced.”

So I got them both pierced. Peter laughed himself silly, the first time he saw the both of us with our matching studs. Oliver choked on his drink.

Gabriele and I took a few trips down to Little Italy, which we hadn’t done since Thanksgiving our first year, and I was surprised to realize I no longer found the accents abrasive, nor the American slang. Gabriele made faces but didn’t complain.

“I’m going back to Italy, when we graduate,” he said. I had figured. He was welcome to visit – “your parents. I’ve only heard you extend the invitation to every one of our friends.”

I was starting to think that my life might be shifting back overseas, piece by piece, whether I wanted it to or not. But I had left for New York such a different person than I was now, and New York had shaped so much of that new person. I wasn’t sure I could go back. Or that I even wanted to.

Staying here was looking pretty appealing.

In August, Oliver announced that he would be away for a week, and could I possibly watch Paul? There were no quartet rehearsals in his apartment, he added, to sweeten the deal. When I asked where he was going, though, his face shuttered and he sounded more embarrassed than I’d ever heard him as explained that his brother was finally getting married, and he was going home for the wedding.

I had thought he’d been disowned, I didn’t say, but he must have seen it on my face, because he laughed – mostly at himself, I thought – and said, “he asked. We’re making an exception.”

I didn’t know how to apologize, or what I could say to make things better, because there was nothing _to_ say. But the same protective instinct that had thawed my frosty distance from my parents to give Oliver a family for the holidays drove me to offer, “do you want… someone to go with you? Not like, as a plus one, just – they don’t know about us, so I’m just a friend from New York. I can wear Peter’s clothes and play up the camp so you look straight by comparison.”

“Hey,” said Peter, to which Oliver responded with a mollifying, “I really don’t know how you make them look so gay. Peter always looked fine.”

“ _Thank_ you.”

I ignored Peter in favor of turning Oliver’s mocking back on him. If lightness and distraction was what he wanted, light and distracting I would be. “Oh, sure, Mr. ‘if I unbutton this shirt any further it’ll fall off.’”

“I look straight,” Oliver protested, looking down at his own chest. He did have a point; the pendulum of fashion may not have swung quite far enough away from deep-vees, but Oliver had settled into his professorial persona and had enthusiastically adopted the polo shirt, which by design only unbuttoned a few inches. I, personally, was in mourning.

“Believe me, I know,” I said, sure that this would be the end of it and we would move on. “I agonized over it.”

“You, agonizing over something? Unheard of,” Peter said, grabbing his keys and heading for the door of the coffee shop. “See you guys.”

Oliver watched him go for long enough that I thought he might be taking it as his cue to leave, too, before returning his gaze to the table and Peter’s abandoned plate. He seemed to be struggling to say something.

“If you wanted to come. You could.”

So Gabriele watched Paul and enjoyed the silence, and Oliver and I went to Vermont for four days. We rented a car, which I thought was a needless expense, but Oliver assured me that we – or he, at least – would appreciate an escape vehicle; there was nothing but farmland and forest for miles surrounding his family’s home and no telling whether we might have to slip away for an afternoon and just scream into the woods.

I had spent hardly any time in America outside of cities, so the drive, while tedious and familiar to Oliver, was endlessly fascinating to me. I had thought most of the farmland in the country was further west, but – “there’s so many cows.”

“They fed us the same diet, growing up,” Oliver said, without taking his eyes from the road.

“No wonder you look so much like one.”

 _That_ made Oliver look up, smile twitching at his lips, sunglasses obscuring the exasperated fondness I knew was in his eyes. “If you could _not_ flirt with me while we’re with my homophobic family…”

Sorry, sorry. Force of habit.

But it wasn’t, because I’d always been too nervous to flirt back when we had _actually_ been together. Flirting was a development from the time when we weren’t. Oliver knew it, too.

“Do your habits often lie dormant for four years just to resurface at the least convenient time?”

“I’m like a seductive cicada,” I told him.

Oliver couldn’t fully keep the laughter out of his voice as he told me that I’d got my math wrong; he should have another three years of peace, then. A locust, then. Unpredictable.

“You’re right, you do plague me.”

I had never enjoyed a road trip more.

Oliver’s family were what Oliver called _New England Nice:_ the perfect hosts, but I got the uncomfortable sense that they were quietly judging me at every turn. They absolutely were, Oliver assured me.

“Did you have to bring someone like _that,”_ Oliver’s mother hissed, upon first seeing me. I had dressed in my own clothing in the end, even going so far as to forego the earring despite Gabriele’s lamenting prognostication that it would heal over if I took the stud out. I thought I looked pretty harmless.

I looked to Oliver for guidance, but his clenched teeth and equally frosty “I don’t know what you’re talking about” provided me with none. I had definitely gotten myself into something.

Oliver’s mother wouldn’t hear of us rooming together, no matter how fervently Oliver protested that we were not what she thought we were, so I ended up stuck with Oliver’s young cousin Lindsey, which was infinitely worse than the quartet. _“You’re_ why Oliver is throwing a tantrum?” she asked as she showed me to our room, with all the disdain and unwarranted self-confidence typical of a thirteen-year-old girl. “Lucky for you you’re with me; I’m a lot more fun than he is.”

I didn’t know how to answer that. While it was amusing, and a little endearing, to watch Oliver so stymied, I was _not_ prepared to be the target of yet another friend’s relative’s hero-worship crush. Lindsey and I didn’t even have philosophy to talk about, like Liv and I had.

“You volunteered for this,” Oliver said, smugly, clearly glad that I was as miserable as he was. He had discovered that while _his_ Italian skills were old hat, if he caught me off-guard enough to make me reply in kind, Lindsey went starry-eyed. I loathed him.

Oliver’s father, a man of few words, summed up the general feeling on my presence, particularly in Lindsey’s room: “at least we know he won’t try anything.”

Charming.

It wasn’t all bad. I liked watching Oliver in the environment he had grown up in, far from the restraints and expectations of his life in New York. His accent flattened out around his family; sometimes he even said _shucks_ , which was so comically, delightfully out of character for him that I vowed to make him say it as often as possible going forward.

But there were limits to how much of a relaxed, youthful Oliver I could take, and a group expedition to the local swimming hole was beyond those limits. A glistening, barefoot Oliver in just swimming trunks was not a boon in my attempt to play it straight.

I had an allergy, I said, and ignored the heated look Oliver sent my way. I was sure everyone could see how red my face felt and how his eyes burned into mine. He remembered, then. Only this time, it meant _go on without me._

“Suit yourself,” Oliver said.

So I stayed behind with Lindsey, who did, in fact, have an allergy, and told her about my summers in Italy, about swimming every day and going to lunch at whoever’s house we felt like, of my secret spot, and, though it still ached, Oliver talking on the rocks with Vimini.

Lindsey was not interested in hearing about Oliver; she wanted to know about _me._ But, she allowed, “he sounds more fun when you talk about him. I’m not supposed to talk to him at all.”

That ached more.

But talking to Lindsey had opened my eyes to the fact that I did miss those carefree summers, in a way I hadn’t for the past few years. Maybe it was time to visit home, after all. Oliver and I had managed a summer together here in the States; maybe a summer in Italy, with or without him, wasn’t so unthinkable now.

Oliver’s brother’s wedding was very nice, though the music during the reception grated at my ears. His new wife, Sharon, shook my hand, with a hesitant “you must be Oliver’s…”

“Friend,” I supplied. “He stayed with my parents four summers ago.”

Sharon looked unconvinced. We had kept in touch, then? Quite the long-term correspondence.

“Completely lost touch, actually. But he taught a few friends of mine and I dated one of his students, so we reconnected,” I said, perfectly cheerful. I might not be able to do New England Nice, but I hadn’t spent eighteen years watching my mother entertain not to pick up _some_ skills. Enough, at least, to counter Sharon’s _you’re quite a bit younger, aren’t you_ with a blinding smile and a, “I like to think age doesn’t matter in a friendship.”

Of course, Sharon said, gracious, and excused herself to mingle.

“Your whole family thinks we’re sleeping together,” I told Oliver when I found him, slumped at a table in the corner, surrounded by discarded cloth napkins. It didn’t escape my notice that aside from Noah and Sharon, no one had approached him to thank him for coming or inquire after his life these days.

Oliver had perked up immediately on seeing me, which shouldn’t have warmed my heart as much as it did given that it was mainly because I was the only person in a several-mile radius who would give him the time of day. “Not Lindsey, I hope. She’d be heartbroken.”

That really wasn’t the disincentive to tell her we _were_ that he had meant it to be.

“Well, this is the last time I’ll see them, so they can think what they like,” he continued, dismissive, but his mouth trembled just a bit on the words. I didn’t know how to help.

“Maybe they’ll come to your wedding,” I offered.

Oliver raised his brows at me, a distinctly unimpressed gesture. I probably deserved it; after all, hadn’t he come out to his family by telling them he would probably never get married? “I thought you were anti-marriage,” he said.

“For me. Once you have your doctorate I’m fully expecting to be best man.”

Oliver shot me a look that, for once, I could interpret perfectly. I shot him one back, hoping I had accurately conveyed the sentiment of _did you really expect me to say something else in front of your family, at your brother’s wedding?_

For a second, Oliver looked chagrined. Then he winked, looked around us, and said, in still-shaky Italian, “for a second there I thought you’d given up on me.”

Never.

It was a joke, on his part and on mine, but it was also terribly, heart-wrenchingly sincere. I knew it, and he knew, it and probably anyone watching us knew it too, even if they couldn’t understand the words. Oliver could have said anything in the world, and the look on his face still would have told me everything I needed to know – that he didn’t _want_ me to have given up on him.

“Persistent motherfucker,” he said.

I laughed, startled out of my agonized musings and into English. “Who taught you that word?” Oliver raised his brows. Of course I knew who. “He’s a bad influence on you,” I informed him.

“ _You’re_ a bad influence on me.” He hadn’t made the shift to English with me, and I knew it was because those were words he couldn’t say in any language anyone else might understand. They were just for me.

I was reminded, suddenly, of standing on the pavement outside Julia’s apartment, of the way flirting with her had felt so natural, so easy, of how I hadn’t cared who saw. I was also reminded of the fact that Oliver was leaning too far into my space, grinning too wide, and people _could_ see. And I knew what they were thinking.

So, though it killed me to watch his smile dim, I leaned back and said, just a little too loudly, as if our conversation had never strayed, “alright. But only if I get the first dance with Lindsey.” Lindsey, a few tables away, turned red. I winked.

“You’re a monster,” Oliver told me, his laughter breathless with the release of whatever he might have said had I not pulled away.

“God know why you put up with me,” I agreed.

“No, I think even he might be stumped by that one.”

Oliver and I had planned to leave straight from the wedding; Oliver was not eager to spend any more time with his family than he had to, and even though it made me ache in sympathy for him, I wasn’t about to force him into another day of uncomfortable stares and veiled insults. He hadn’t wanted my pity before, and he certainly didn’t want it now, and that meant leaving early.

As we made our way out of the venue and Oliver detoured to bid a tense farewell to his parents, Noah caught me by the arm and pulled me aside. He looked nervous, which did not bode well – the only times I had seen men look that nervous to speak to me had always preceded awkward conversations about my sexuality.

“Oliver says you’re not – like him,” Noah said, halting and embarrassed. It made _me_ embarrassed on his behalf. “I’m not so sure I believe him, but…”

Every other time this had happened, I had come clean. I had always felt that I owed it to people, because they were my friends, or because I simply felt odd lying about it. But I didn’t know Noah, and even if I had made my peace with James’ impact on my life, the caution he had taught me would never truly fade. So I pulled my arm from Noah’s grip and informed him that it was sweet of Oliver to defend my honor like that, but I didn’t need it. “There would be nothing wrong with it, if I was.”

Noah laughed and swept a hand through his hair in a gesture that was so much like Oliver that it took my breath away. “My family would disagree with you. I don’t know that I don’t.”

Well, that was his problem, not mine. And after today, it wasn’t Oliver’s either.

Noah looked at the floor, littered with flower petals and those small crepe-paper curlicues brides always seemed so enamored with. “I wish he didn’t think he had to do this.”

“He’s not the one who made that choice.”

I looked over my shoulder, praying that whatever stilted interaction Oliver was taking part in was nearly over so that he could come save me from mine, and as such, I almost missed what Noah said next, so quiet it was.

“It’s weird to see someone protecting my brother,” he admitted. “He hasn’t let me do it in years.”

I thought Oliver was humoring me, honestly. Or if he _was_ accepting what protection I could offer him, he would never admit it. Oliver was, at least in his own mind, an island, and accepting help from others didn’t come easily to him. But Noah probably knew all that, and if I was truly just the casual acquaintance I was pretending to be, I probably shouldn’t. So I said nothing.

“If you aren’t both lying to us and you really aren’t like him,” Noah began, and, like everyone else I had spoken to over that weekend, his voice told me he didn’t believe the lie at all, “just… be careful with him.”

“I would never hurt him.”

Noah shook his head. “Maybe not on purpose. But the way he looks at you – I don’t want him to get his heart broken.”

“He’s assured me multiple times I don’t have the power to do that,” I said, diplomatic, though I wasn’t so sure of the truth of it anymore. I rather thought Oliver’s heart had been in the process of breaking for nearly the entire time I’d known him, and someday the entire thing would snap and we’d have to pick up the pieces.

“He’s always been a good poker player.”

 _Not the game you’re playing,_ Julia had said. That, it seemed, hadn’t changed.

I would take it under advisement.

I thought the conversation was over, but Noah, nerves returned in force, had one final thing to say. “I don’t agree with the lifestyle he’s choosing. But he’s my baby brother, and if this is the only shovel talk I ever get to give…”

I wanted to push back, to shout at him that Oliver was not _choosing_ this; that even if he _was_ , that choice ought to be respected, not shunned; that if his family expected him to choose to be anything other than what he was, they didn’t deserve to be his family at all. But this was a wedding, and it was not my battle to fight. So I smiled, strained though it might have looked, and promised that I would give the rest of them: _only I get to break Oliver’s heart._

Noah laughed and punched me on arm, and I thought, fuck it. Oliver will probably never see these people again, and I _definitely_ never will; what’s the harm?

“I’ll never know what it’s like to be rejected by my family for who I am,” I said, obliquely honest. “But I know the night he called you, he got drunk and slept on my couch because he couldn’t stand being alone. So just… if we’re talking about breaking hearts.”

Noah didn’t answer.

In the rented car on the drive back, I turned to Oliver to ask, “how do you feel about Italy for Hanukkah?”

“Thank you,” Oliver said.

For dragging him along so I didn’t have to spend the holidays alone with my parents?

“For lying to my mother. And entertaining my cousin. And saying no when my dad suggested we go boating.”

But I heard it for what it was: _thank you for being there._

Sean, it turned out, also smoked a lot of weed. Part and parcel of being from Portland, he said. No one escaped the grunge. The electric violin was a fucking travesty, Peter said. But he joined us without too much complaining, and the four of us plus Izzy spent much of the rest of the summer comfortably stoned.

I liked the slower pace; it reminded me again of summer in Italy – not the bright, frenetic energy of the summer Oliver had come, but the lazy summers of my childhood. I supposed it was fitting, as my last summer before I had to enter the adult world and leave these sorts of days behind.

For those last few days, Oliver was as far from my mind as he’d ever been. We would have to come to our reckoning soon, I knew, but for just a few more days, for just a little while longer, I wanted to be a child again. September would bring us crashing back together, as it always did. There was no rush.

This year, this last year, I knew, would be my year. This year, finally, something would happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Sorry violists, I love you really; just couldn't resist. This is the only one, I promise.)


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was gonna wait to post this until I was done with everything but there's only like... 5,000 words of this fic left to write, so fuck it, have a chapter :P (aka the one where they _finally_ talk)
> 
> Should I have introduced a new 11th-hour recurring character? Probably not. Do I adore him? Absolutely yes.

Oliver almost didn’t seem to notice that we were spending less time together – he was close to done with his dissertation and focused on it with a singular intensity I hadn’t seen from him even when he was working on his book. Tommy, when I asked him if this was normal or cause for worry, shrugged and told me cheerfully that he had three more years before they kicked him out so in his mind there was no rush.

But Oliver seemed determined to finish before the school year was out. More often than not when I visited him and Tommy, I found myself in the position of proofreader and cheerleader. “Elio, you’re a layman, tell me if this makes sense” became one of my most frequently-heard phrases.

I didn’t mind being ignored as much as I would have thought I might, because the quiet allowed me to get my own work done. I had decided on my final composition, a piano concerto, and secured a soloist, Gabriele. “Come on,” I’d scoffed, when he expressed surprise at being asked, “it was always going to be you, since Thanksgiving freshman year.”

Oliver asked to hear what I had so far, but I told him he would hear it when it was done. I had an idea forming, in the back of my head, of where my life was going, and I didn’t want Oliver to hear it until I was sure what it meant.

There were two new composition majors, though I was now too busy to pay much attention to first years. I did know, from what Clara told me, that one of them was a jackass and the other was a girl named Samantha who Clara intended to adopt. That was nice, I told her, and did she by any chance know any baroque guitarists?

“Try the MA students?” Clara offered, and that was how I met Nicholas.

Nicholas was a master’s student in historical performance, and gratifyingly excited that someone wanted to compose a piece for classical guitar. He had an incredible poise and a soft-spoken, kind demeanor to match, and I was _pretty sure_ he was gay. Not that I was going to make the mistake of assuming something like that about someone on such little evidence again.

But if he _was_ – Nicholas was twenty-six, only two years younger than Oliver, and if he had lived as a gay man out in the adult world, and in New York in particular, perhaps he could give me some insights into why Oliver was so hesitant around me, even after all we had been through, how close we now were.

But I was not about to ask, and Nicholas did not seem about to tell me.

Now that the end was in sight, time seemed to move almost too quickly for me to keep up with it. Daniel called from Germany to inform us that Anna planned to convert to Judaism and wanted to start a getting-disowned club with Oliver – a sensitive subject, but Oliver took it with grace.

My birthday passed without much fanfare. Peter gave me a French-English dictionary and Gabriele gave me a French-Italian one, “so you can decide which of us you like better,” but I didn’t feel much of a need to celebrate beyond that – my family had never been big on birthdays, and my experience of birthdays in America tended to end with me very hungover, so I was happy to spend a quiet evening with my two best friends.

Gabriele complained that it was our last chance to throw a big party, but, as Peter said, we were almost real adults and therefore allowed to be boring if we wanted to be. So we went to a restaurant, and Peter teased me and Gabriele for drinking brandy. “Alright, grandpa, you’re twenty-two. You’ve got to be at least Oliver’s age before you’re allowed to get _that_ boring.”

I laughed along with him, but the mention of Oliver reminded me of the dinner party we had gone to in Rome, the first time I had drunk brandy, and of how out of place I had felt in such an adult gathering. I missed that innocence, a bit. So I flagged down a waiter and ordered my father’s college cocktail of choice for the table, even if I still found blueberry vodka disgusting. “You’re only young once,” I told Gabriele, when he made faces at it.

Kathleen invited me to dinner, which I accepted, and I arrived to homemade apricot pie and several jars of apricot jam, with a note from my parents informing me that yes, of course, I was welcome home for the holidays, and yes, of course, Oliver was welcome with me.

Also, Oliver was there.

He had gotten me the second volume of Alfredo’s poems, which, while I had come around to Peter’s conclusion that the author was, in fact, a fetishizing asshole, was still such a sweet gesture that I was left momentarily speechless.

“I had to write and ask him to send me a copy, since it hasn’t been published in the US,” Oliver explained. He shouldn’t have been so surprised by my hug, I thought. We were well beyond that point. But he sounded embarrassed when he mumbled, “it’s just a book.”

It wasn’t, and he knew it. But I let him pretend, and instead I told him about drinking brandy with Gabriele and Peter teasing us, and how I still missed late nights in Italy sometimes. I thought maybe that was a thank-you he would accept.

“You didn’t throw up, did you?” Oliver asked, arch and teasing, which I supposed I would have to take as a _you’re welcome._

“I don’t think either of them would have held my hair for me.”

“Any one of your friends would hold your hair.”

I was going to miss them. But I was beginning to think there was a world wherein I didn’t have to, and I had made it my mission to find out. Oliver just wasn’t aware of the part he played in that yet.

Sean baked me a weed cake.

For Thanksgiving, Gabriele and I hosted a traditional, American-style sit-down dinner. “It’s my last chance before I go back,” Gabriele said. “Gotta prove I’ve assimilated.”

“I think you saying _gotta_ is proof enough.”

Gabriele shoved me, and I heard Peter’s laughter through the phone. “It’s not a potluck, but we do ask that everyone bring their own chair, because this is a sit-down meal and we only have three because _some asshole_ took the chairs with him when he left.”

But of course none of us owned cars in which to transport chairs, so the nine of us squeezed onto schnapps couch and the three chairs Sean had scavenged up from somewhere to replace the ones Peter had taken. Sean himself grabbed a plate and retreated to the one chair we had left squeezed into the corner between the table and the half-wall separating the kitchenette from the rest of the room, which I couldn’t blame him for. Even in its slightly reduced size, our group could be intimidating.

It was strange not to have Daniel there; he had been present at every one of these gatherings since Yom Kippur in our first year. But Laurie was there, now, and I still had Izzy and Peter and Rebecca, and even her roommate Nina, who I tended to forget about until she showed up in tow at one of these events.

And, of course, I had Oliver. I couldn’t really be lonely, not with him beside me on schnapps couch, every inch of our sides pressed together to accommodate Gabriele and Peter as well, bracketing us in and forcing us much closer than perhaps either of us was comfortable with in such a public arena. Izzy, perched on the arm of the couch with her feet in Peter’s lap, winked at me.

On December first, I asked Oliver if he was still planning to come home with me over the break. He was, as he always seemed to be of gestures of goodwill, suspicious. Why this year? I had never gone home before.

I shrugged, guilty for lying to him but not about to tell him the truth. “This might be the last chance I get. December is a busy time for musicians.”

“If you’re sure you want me.”

 _I always want you,_ I thought. His choice of words had not been an accident. Neither was mine. “I think my parents would turn me away at the door if I showed up without you. Besides, my dad will be a much better proofreader than I am.”

“Well, we can’t have you wasting airfare like that,” Oliver said, and though the matter wasn’t truly settled, it was close enough.

The truth, the thing that I hadn’t said and felt guilty for not saying, was that I had to be sure. I had to know what it was like to have Oliver fully in my life, to eat a meal with him and with my parents, not in a swanky restaurant with his mentor but in my own home, just the four of us. I had to know if he still fit the way he had before. We worked, in New York, as friends and maybe as something more, if either of us ever took the plunge, but if everything else in my life followed the slow trajectory Europe-wards I had sensed back in April, I had to know that we worked there, too.

Oliver probably knew, I thought, but as always, he was letting me work it out myself.

Fortuitously, my composition for the baroque guitar had been chosen for a student performance, which meant that Nicholas and I spent a fair amount of time together in the weeks leading up to it. I was glad of it; Nicholas was funny and easygoing and had the kind of musical talent that made my writing sound better just because he was playing it.

Sometimes, though, he looked at me with a speculative gaze just a little too reminiscent of the way James had looked at me, back when we used to spend time alone in practice rooms together and I had held my tongue out of what had turned out to be an _under_ abundance of caution. It made me nervous, and I always looked away when I caught it.

I couldn’t have begun to say what it was that finally tipped the scales, but one afternoon, only a week before Oliver and I were set to leave for Italy, he finally said something. When he did, though, it was not what I had expected.

“Look, Elio, you’re a great kid, and a damn talented one at that, but… nothing’s going to happen here.”

It was gentle and apologetic, nothing like what I had been fearing from those speculative looks. I whipped back around to face him with a speed which must have seemed comical, denial hot on my lips. What? No, no, of course nothing would happen, there was nothing _to_ happen, I had no thoughts of any kind in that direction, had he thought I was into him? Because I wasn’t, truly, I swear, so there was no need to –

If anything, Nicholas’ gaze became even more speculative. “No. I can see you’re not.” And then the shutters went down over his eyes and his body hunched in over his guitar, and that gaze turned fearful as he stared down at his hands and said he was sorry for assuming, clearly he had made a mistake, and that he would understand if I didn’t feel comfortable being alone with him now, and that –

Suddenly I understood. We were either both fools, or both men who had been burned before and were now so wary of being burned again that we were falling over ourselves to deny the truth of each other we had both clocked on meeting. He was as scared as I was. More, maybe. As scared as Oliver must be.

“You’re fine,” I said, because I didn’t think _it’s okay_ would ring true enough to do any good. Of course it wasn’t okay; in a world where it was _okay_ we wouldn’t be having this half-spoken conversation. “Really. I just wasn’t…”

Expecting it? Hitting on you? Prepared to be faced with the fear that I had only recently come to recognize in myself, the knowledge that some people would hate me for who I was no matter what I did or said, and that I might always have to do this dance? All three, probably.

Nicholas clearly took it as the second. “I’m married.”

Oh. _Oh._ That was… well, _that_ was unexpected. I slumped, a little, with the release of all that nervous energy I had thought we _both_ felt. Clearly I had been wrong.

Nicholas raised his eyebrows. “Are you disappointed?”

“Why would I be?” I was, but only because I had thought there was a kinship between us, and now even if there was, he was not living the sort of life that would make him someone I could ask for clarification as to what was going through Oliver’s head.

Nicholas set the guitar on the floor beside him and swept his hand through his hair, startlingly like Oliver when he was frustrated. It was somehow soothing in its incongruity; if I had shaken Nicholas out of his usual poise, at least that meant he felt as awkward as I did in that moment. “I didn’t mean to insinuate,” he began, and I suddenly saw this exchange of half-truths stretching out for the rest of the week, until we were freed of our obligation to interact with each other and both turned tail and ran.

“It’s okay,” I said, even though it still wasn’t. “I just… I didn’t expect _you_ to be married.”

“Well, it’s not legal, but… we bought each other rings,” he said, laughing self-consciously. I didn’t know why; I thought that was incredibly sweet. Then he looked rueful, and I realized that this time around, _I_ was the one who hadn’t said anything incriminating. For the first time, someone else was unsure enough of my sexuality that I had to be the one to tell them. “You really aren’t disappointed? Because I thought –“

I quirked a half-smile at him. I had never really gotten to do this before; I wanted to savor it. “Maybe a bit.”

“Just a bit?”

He was smiling too, now, and with the charged, nervous air between us finally dissipated I realized that it had been there all along up until this point. It was a relief, not to have to be so careful anymore. “I was disappointed because _I_ had thought… we were the same.”

“I have liked women before,” he admitted, like it was almost as shameful as _not_ liking them. That, I didn’t understand.

“Me too. But I’ve never wanted to marry one.”

Nicholas grinned at me, and his laughter, though still rueful, was the most carefree, unrestrained sound I had ever heard from him. “Are you _sure_ you didn’t want anything from me?”

Well, I had wanted one thing, I supposed.

He _knew_ it; gaydar still working perfectly, thank you very much. What, then? He probably couldn’t give it to me, but he would try to help me find it.

I thought he could, actually. In fact, I thought he was the perfect person to give it to me. “I wanted to ask you some questions.”

“Oh, no,” Nicholas said, shaking his head emphatically. “No, definitely not. You want to talk to someone else. I am not old enough to give advice; god, do I look like I have my shit together enough for that? You don’t want my advice, trust me.”

But I did. I wanted it _because_ he didn’t have his shit together, because he wasn’t that much older than me, and because he had been brave enough to turn me down even when he was afraid. He was just enough like Oliver that I wanted to know _everything_ about that fear.

Nicholas, with the perceptiveness of one who had to spend his life gauging other men’s intentions, saw all this on my face. He rolled his eyes. “Alright. Who is he?”

I told him. It was nice to do it on my own terms, for once. And though I knew it wouldn’t always go this well, I let myself hope it could.

Oliver and I made a stop-off in Germany, partly to see Daniel and Anna, but mostly because it was cheaper to fly in to Berlin and catch the train. They loved the German countryside; it was so nice to be away from the constraints of family and who they had been at eighteen. Listening to them talk, I could see the future spiraling out before them – a future wherein they looked just like my parents. That didn’t seem so confining to me, anymore.

“Come stay with us whenever you make it overseas next,” Daniel said. I said I would think about it.

We took our time making our way down to Italy, and consequently didn’t make it to B. until dark. My parents greeted us at the door with the same pleasantries they offered every guest to the villa: it was so good to see us, it had been too long, we must be tired. They hadn’t known what rooming configuration we would want, so they’d just made up both beds and we could work it out for ourselves.

Oliver and I exchanged glances. “I’ll take the guest room,” I said, decisively, just as Oliver said the exact same thing. My parents shared their own glance, though it was considerably more amused.

He was already imposing, Oliver argued. He was too tall for my grandfather’s tiny old bed, I argued back.

“It’s your room.”

_No. It’s ours._

I won the argument, as I had known I would, when Oliver discovered that he was in fact too tall for the guest bed. We readied ourselves for bed in companionable silence and parted in the hallway with a pleasant goodnight, and I tried not to imagine him sleeping in my old bed, just beyond the wall, the way he had done five years ago, when he had kissed me and broken my heart.

How far we had come.

Around midnight, I gave in. The walk across the balcony from my room to his felt like a dream, like déjà vu. I could hardly believe I was doing it.

I knocked on Oliver’s door.

After an agonizing wait, it opened. “If you’re here to –“ he began, but I cut him off.

“I just want to talk.”

Oliver stepped back, looking as though he didn’t know what to do with himself now that his commitment to self-restraint had been usurped. “Well. Come in, then.”

I followed him over the threshold and into the room proper, wincing as my neck cracked loud enough for Oliver to hear it. I grimaced, and he laughed. “I might not be as tall as you, but that bed is definitely smaller than I remember it,” I said, a needless defense. Oliver’s smile faded and he looked uncertain. Did I want…

“I don’t want to share a bed with you.”

“We shared a bed at Peter’s,” Oliver said; more bewildered than hurt, I thought.

“I don’t want to share _this_ bed with you.”

I knew he would understand. Until we talked, we couldn’t do anything, and unless we were going to do something, I didn’t want to sleep beside him in the bed where we _had_ , once upon a time. We should have talked long ago. Maybe if we had back then, or even if we had at any point over the last three years, things would be different. But as they were, I needed to keep a space between us.

Oliver sat cross-legged in the center of the bed and gestured for me to join him. I did, mirroring him, our knees touching the way they had on the train up to Peter’s house, and I smiled at the memory of my younger self, petrified by desire and so self-conscious that I was hyperaware of even this small point of contact.

Oliver laughed. Winced. “I’m too old to sit like this.” But he didn’t move.

“Old man.”

His foot nudged mine in reprimand. He didn’t like to be reminded of the difference in our ages. I didn’t mind so much, anymore, not now that I knew why it had upset him. And I understood, now, how young I really had been, and how much more his equal I was now that I’d had four years to experience life outside this little bubble.

“We never did talk.”

“Do you want to?”

“Seems a bit late,” Oliver said, wry. He paused. “Or a bit overdue. Can’t tell which.”

Both, probably.

“So,” Oliver said, nudging my foot again. “This bed, huh?”

I laughed. It was so awkward, the two of us sat across from each other like children, or like girls at a sleepover, and Oliver’s asinine conversational opener had only made that more apparent.

“I haven’t slept in it since,” I admitted. He seemed surprised. “It was too raw, and then… I left.” Running from something, Kathleen had said. From my memories of Oliver, from the prospect of having to overwrite them with ones of a summer when he wasn’t there.

But surely – it was my room. Had it really been so painful?

Would I have hated him for so long for anything less?

“You hated me when you met me.”

“I wanted you,” I corrected. “And I hated you for making me want you.”

Oliver smiled at me, eyes fever-bright like they had been in the glow of the projector in front of so many people – only now, we were alone.

“Alright then,” he said again, conversational, teasing. Not how I would have expected a capital-T-talk like this to go, if I had let myself imagine it ever occurring. “In that case… On a scale of one to ten, how much do you hate me right _now_?”

I pretended to think about it. I didn’t hate him at all; hadn’t in years, but the indelible memory of my hatred from the days before we reconnected had stuck with him and morphed into a sort of mythology in his brain, he way of understanding our cyclical relationship.

“Two,” I said. Oliver raised his brows in surprise as feigned as my consideration had been.

“So low?”

I could have said something flip and light, something to keep the conversation on the even keel Oliver had so far steered it. _I’m buttering you up_ , I could have said. _I’m trying to lull you into a false sense of security._

I didn’t.

“I’ve stopped blaming you for my own feelings.”

I watched Oliver’s face. I knew he knew what I meant by _feelings_ , even though the word encompassed a four-and-a-half-year acquaintance and the whole gamut of human emotions. It had meant any number of things over those four and a half years, but now, it meant exactly what it had meant at the very start of them: _I could really, really like you, if you let me._

Or not _exactly._ Back then, I would have called it _love_ with no hesitation. But now – now, I had dated Julia, and I knew what it was like to forego sex in favor of just spending time with someone; I had met in Peter the brother I had once thought Oliver to be; I had sat beside Oliver in a dingy bar and unfolded our whole sordid history, and in the process come to a much better understanding of it. Now, I knew that as well as I knew Oliver, I didn’t know him in the ways I needed to to be able to say _love_ like that. I loved him, sure, unconditionally and for as long as he would let me, but romantically – I still had some learning to do in that arena.

I didn’t know how much of that Oliver heard in one word, but he shook his head in that fond, wondering way he got sometimes when I surprised him. “What did I do to deserve you?”

“Do you want a list?”

He winced. “Probably not.”

Ah. Oliver the Martyr, right on cue. But it wasn’t any of those things, much as he might want to wallow in them.

A list, then.

“You got a dog.”

“Excuse me?”

“You got a dog. That’s number one.” A twelve-year-old golden retriever with a stupid name, just because he was lonely and wanted to rescue someone else even if there was no one to rescue him.

“Love triangle is looking more and more likely,” Oliver said dryly. I ignored him. If this was the one moment he would let me speak, I was going to seize it.

“Number two is because you take my calls in bed.”

Oliver colored. “That’s just where my phone is.”

“But you still take them.”

I couldn’t explain why that meant so much to me. Perhaps it was that no one else had ever taken my calls at midnight – not that I had ever called anyone else so late. Peter would have, or Gabriele, but I lived with them, so they didn’t count. I supposed I was trying to say that Oliver was the kind of person I felt I _could_ reach out to at any hour, and it meant something that he always picked up.

“Of course I do,” he said, his face soft.

“I’d take yours, too,” I said. Just in case he didn’t know.

He did. He didn’t deserve that either, he said, but he knew.

Number three –

“How many of these do you have?”

“As many as you’ll let me say.”

Oliver’s lips quirked in a rueful smile. “How about one more.”

Better make it a good one, then. “Because you look at me like you can’t believe I’m there.”

That was the best way I could think to describe it, all those longing, agonized looks that had only grown more frequent over the years since we’d started to heal the fissure between us that had split in this very bed four years ago. No matter what else they contained – and they had contained a lot, depending on where we stood at the time – there was always an undercurrent of disbelief. Awe, almost. It would have been flattering if it weren’t so heartbreaking.

“I can’t, sometimes,” he admitted. “It’s hard to believe that you’ve really come back to me.”

We were _so close._ If I reached out and touched, if I just smoothed over that last hairline fracture, we could be there. But you can’t mend a broken plate with just lacquer. This crack ran deeper.

“I have been for a while,” I said, as lightly as I could manage in the hopes that he wouldn’t shrink back from momentous things as he always seemed to these days. “I’m just waiting for you.”

Oliver was quiet for several moments, staring at his bare ankles – or at mine; I couldn’t tell. I suddenly felt exposed and wished I had worn longer socks. What a silly thing to think, but with Oliver’s anguished gaze directed at my feet I couldn’t help but want to cover up.

“Can I give you the list of why I don’t, now?”

Oh.

Well, I had wanted honesty from him. And I had known his reservations were not about me, but about himself. I should have seen this coming.

I shrugged.

“I wasn’t honest with you.”

“You’re honest with me now, though,” I said. He had admitted as much, the last time we had spoken over the winter holidays, and I saw no reason to doubt him. I had seen for myself the way my mere presence seemed to compel honesty from him; if not in his words, at least in his looks, his actions. If people like Peter and Julia and even _Sharon_ could see it, surely it couldn’t be feigned.

On purpose, he said. He had vowed, the moment he had seen my eyes flick to his hand where a ring should have fit, that he wouldn’t lie to me again. And it had been hard, at first, painful to admit the ways he hadn’t measured up to the life he had thought he wanted, but eventually it had become habit, and with enough time that habit had become so instinctive that it was almost impossible _not_ to be honest with me. The painful thing now was keeping it in.

Then don’t, I wanted to say. You have to know that that’s not what I want from you. But his list was not over, and I hoped that somewhere in it might lie the answer to the things he had stopped himself from saying so many times, the answers Nicholas hadn’t been able to give me.

What else, then?

“I was jealous – I _am_ jealous. Of Julia, of Peter, of Gabriele, of anyone you spend your time with who isn’t me. That’s not healthy. And I’ve tried, you know I’ve tried, to step back, to let you have those people and those years without me, but I hate it. And I hate that I feel like I have some right to you, just because we slept together years ago.” He saw the protest on my lips and held up a hand to forestall it. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t mind it. I still don’t like feeling… possessive.”

 _That_ was interesting. I had always felt possessive of him, and it had upset me that he didn’t feel the same – or that I thought he didn’t. I had _wanted_ to be possessed by him, and then once I had grown up a bit and made real friends, not just cousins or acquaintances, I had still at least wanted him to covet my time.

It should have felt like vindication to know that he did. Instead, I had the uneasy, adult experience of realizing that someone else is completely right about a situation, and that that makes you completely wrong.

I hesitated. This was more serious than my list had been, and I wanted to do it right. “I’m jealous too, you know. Of people I’ve never even met; people you don’t even talk to anymore. It might not be healthy, but it’s _human._ It’s not something worth hating yourself over.”

“I’m very good at hating myself,” Oliver said, again with that infuriating quirk of his mouth. I wanted to kiss it off him. I knew I couldn’t.

“One more,” I told him. “Fair’s fair.”

“I broke your heart once. I’m terrified of doing it again.”

If anything was going to break my heart, hearing that might just do it.

But I didn’t think he could. Not because I had hardened it against him, the way I had thought I was doing when I had first begun to desensitize myself to seeing him. No; now, I knew myself better. I knew not to place too much on uncertainties. I knew how to make informed decisions, and how to listen to my own needs. And I knew what I wanted.

If anything, I was more likely to break his.

Alright, I said. I’d heard all that, and I understood. But I had one addendum to make to my own list.

“What’s that?”

“I – “ I couldn’t say _love._ Hadn’t I just thought that I couldn’t? But it was true, in the sense that I meant it now. And yet.

We weren’t there yet.

“I care about you. I want you in my life. _I_ think you’re worthy of my – my time, my affection, my friendship. I’m the one giving it, and I think you deserve it.”

It would take him a while to let himself believe that, he admitted. That was alright. I had a while to prove it to him.

But I had just one question for him, one question he had never let himself answer directly. I had listened to him explain why we _shouldn’t;_ I needed to hear the most basic reason for why we _should._ “Do you want this?”

“Yes,” he said, a long breath of it, like that one word contained all the _yes_ es he had held back for so many years. “yes, of course I do. I always have. But not…”

_Not like this. Not while we still are what we have been._

I understood. I felt the same way, even. He needed me to be my own person, not just someone who happened to live close to him. He needed me to have the option to leave, and choose to stay. _That_ was the proof I could give him. Just not quite yet.

“Not yet, right?”

He grinned at me. “Not yet. But later.”

I did not share that bed with Oliver that night. But the next night, I dragged an old mattress into the room and slept on the floor beside him, listening to him breathe and dreaming of _later._

Oliver slotted back into life at the villa like he had never left it. My parents were thrilled to have him, particularly my father. He claimed it was a midlife crisis and he was just desperate to relive his own graduate-school days, but I thought he really just liked having someone around who would indulge his word games and flights of academic fancy. My mother looked like she appreciated the reprieve.

“He looks even more like a movie star now,” she told me. “You could do much worse.” Mortified, I fled the room.

Oliver _did_ look good. ‘Professorial’ suited him, as did the reading glasses he had taken to wearing late at night. I wasn’t about to say anything about it, though. I wasn’t _that_ much of a cliché. Besides, we were trying to move past the whole “professor-slash-student” thing.

I had, however, become obsessed with precisely how many layers Oliver was wearing on any given day. During our summer together we had both always been practically naked, and when he had visited during my last year of high school I had been too consumed with anger to really notice what he was wearing.

This Oliver, this longsleeved, buttoned-up Oliver, was the Oliver I knew now, the New York Oliver. _My_ Oliver. Seeing him here, like this, was like my two worlds crashing together into one confusing pastiche – childhood and adulthood, Italy and America, desire and friendship. I didn’t know which parts I preferred.

If the world were no bigger than this, I thought, we could be happy here. But it was so much wider than it had been when I was seventeen, life so much fuller, and I knew that neither of us could ever be happy existing in isolation like that.

The days passed quickly, despite how much I wanted to grab them and hold them, to slow down time and keep him there with me for just a little longer before we had to go back to New York and be who we were in the real world. Oliver put the finishing touches on his dissertation and I took advantage of having sole access to a piano to write music. My final composition would be due soon enough, and I knew now what I wanted it to be.

I knew the shape of things, now.

My father dropped us at the station with a teary-eyed reminder that we were both welcome back whenever we wanted, for however long we wanted. Oliver looked like he might cry as well. _See, Noah,_ I thought. _He has family. He doesn’t need you._

But then my father looked at me, and I knew that he knew the truth of it. “I’ll see you soon,” I promised. I couldn’t bear to see the understanding that must be plain on his face. I’d made up my mind, and I had a concerto to write.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vaguely ominous ending????? what could this mean?????????
> 
> I know y'all were expecting a sex scene here but the truth is that I absolutely hate writing them and you will be getting exactly ONE so it was never going to happen in this chapter.
> 
> Also, would people be interested in me linking my moodboard spotify playlist for this fic? I'm not totally sure how I would do that but if it was something y'all would be into I could try.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BAM ten thousand word update two days later; bet y'all weren't expecting that.
> 
> Anyway this is another double-post situation because I'm pretty sure that if I don't post chapter 20 along with this one you'll all get together and murder me so! Here they both are.

Oliver disappeared in a frenzy of paperwork, and I dedicated myself in the meantime to music – I was, after all, a music student, though I tended to forget it when I was around Oliver.

Everyone else around me had retreated into their own personal academic bubbles, too. Clara complained that I was no fun anymore, to which I pointed out that she had, as she’d once told me, _made other friends._ “Go spend time with Samantha.”

“She’s just as studious as you are,” Clara said with a long-suffering sigh. “And not nearly as interesting to watch. She hasn’t had _one_ dramatic breakup; you’ve had like three.”

I had no idea which three she was counting. “Give her time,” I said vaguely, returning my gaze to my music.

I met Nicholas’ partner quite by accident on the steps of Lincoln, and the only reason I knew was because Nicholas looked scared, for just a second, before he smiled at me and did his best to look like he hadn’t.

“Is this…” I began, hesitant, unsure if introductions were necessary or even desired.

“Dominique,” the man said, and something in his forthrightness was familiar, though I couldn’t say why. “I take it you’re the twink Nick thought was hitting on him?”

“ _Dom,”_ Nicholas hissed, but the teasing voice and the playful light in Dominique’s eyes had just clicked for me.

“You’re Laurie’s brother.”

Dominique’s eyes widened. _“You’re_ the guy my kid sister outed? Apologies on her behalf, dude.”

“Can we not have this conversation _on the street,”_ Nicholas said, which was a fair point, but nothing was going to prevent Dominique from asking me to fill in on the parts of the story he hadn’t heard from either Nicholas or Laurie. “I regret this _immensely.”_

Nicholas grudgingly invited me to dinner. Dominique invited me dancing.

“You went dancing with my _brother?”_ Laurie said, incredulous. “He still won’t let me go with him and you’ve known him for like fifteen minutes.”

Privately, I thought that the kind of places Dominique and Nicholas – and once, memorably, Oliver – and I went were probably not places Laurie would have fun, but I was not about to tell her that. “He’s teaching me how to pick up guys.”

“Like you want to pick up anyone other than Oliver,” Laurie muttered. “I miss when you were closeted.” But she winked at me.

“And I miss when _you_ weren’t such a buzzkill,” I teased back.

“I want to be a professor one day; I’ve got to get a head start.”

Julia called me on Valentine’s Day, which I thought was fitting. She loved Vienna; she was singing small gigs to pay her way through grad school and couldn’t be happier. “I think I understand you better, now that I’ve been here,” she told me. “You should’ve come seen me in December.”

Sorry. I’d been… busy.

“How’s Oliver?”

Oliver was having, to the best of my ability to decipher his increasingly scattered phone conversations with me, some sort of dissertation-related breakdown. I was doing my best to supply him with food and company when I could, but Tommy advised me there was nothing to do but let it run its course. Either he passed and it was over, or he failed and it kept going. Not a very reassuring diagnosis.

She’d heard we spent the holidays together. From who? Rebecca. How had Rebecca heard? Daniel. Did they all just keep tabs on me?

“We’re invested to see how this plays out.”

“Not how you’re expecting, I think.”

Oliver might need me to choose to stay with him, but what _I_ needed was to leave. Just for a little while. Just to be myself, without him, for a mew months. I had never truly been an adult without him in my life, and he was right; he was seven years older than me, and I had a lot of catching up to do. I needed to do at least a little bit of it on my own.

I wasn’t sure how to break the news of it.

I still hadn’t gotten the truth out of Julia as to who _she_ had been pining over while we were together. I didn’t get it out of Rebecca, either. But, surprisingly, I got something else.

“So you told Julia about Oliver coming with me to Italy?” I asked, on one of the rare occasions we were alone together. In true conservatory fashion, I had to take yet another odd movement class, and as I was an atrocious modern dancer, Rebecca had taken one look at my planned composition and taken pity on me. Dominique said it was baffling how I could be so queer and yet such a bad dancer, and I thought Rebecca might privately agree.

“I wasn’t aware that was privileged information,” she said, frosty. “Though you didn’t tell me, so maybe it was.”

I blinked. It wasn’t; of course it wasn’t. I just… hadn’t thought she would care.

Rebecca let go of my forearm and stepped back, clearly fed up with me, but I couldn’t understand why. “Story of this friendship,” she muttered.

Was this because I hadn’t told her about Oliver to begin with? She couldn’t still be mad about that. But things had been strained between us ever since she had found me in Oliver’s office in such a compromising embrace. Had she really been concealing discomfort with my sexuality this whole time? She _had_ been the most vocally in favor of my dating Julia. How could I not have noticed?

Rebecca threw her hands up in frustration. Even that was graceful. “Yes I fucking can! The one other person in your life who could have empathized with what you were going through, and I had to find out from a woman I’d never even _met?”_

Empathize? What?

Why did I _think_ she brought Nina to all our gatherings?

“She’s your room– “ oh. _Oh._

“ _Yes._ And if you’d pulled your head out of your ass and left your masculine little bubble, maybe you’d have clued in sooner rather than three months before we graduate.”

True as her criticism of who I tended to surround myself with might be, I was still too busy reeling from the fact that _Rebecca_ was… “what about Daniel?”

She shrugged, and I thought I saw a little of her anger slough off her shoulders with it. “I got to college and figured a few things out. I never told him why.”

Huh. A lesbian. I’d never met a lesbian before; probably an oversight I should remedy. But then did that mean – she and Julia?

They’d tried it once, after my birthday. And? It wasn’t her thing. Hell of a way to stop resenting someone, though.

“Do you know –“ I started, and this time Rebecca’s exasperated exhale was closer to amused than righteously – and rightfully – slighted.

“The person she made up to make you feel better about being hung up on Oliver?”

She had made them up? That knowledge settled uncomfortably in my gut, more shameful than Rebecca’s rebuke had made me feel. I had thought Julia and I were equals. I’d felt okay about my feelings for Oliver because I’d thought we were in the same boat. Now I just felt like a jerk.

“She made it seem more than it was, I think,” Rebecca said. That made me feel a little better; Rebecca was not the type to sugarcoat things. I she thought it wasn’t a big deal, it probably wasn’t. “She was on the way to over it when you guys got together, and dating you put the final nail in the coffin. And _no,_ I won’t tell you who.”

She didn’t need to. I’d wanted to spend Valentine’s Day with Oliver, and Julia had wanted to spend it with James. Our romantic trajectories had crossed on that day, briefly, as mine picked up speed and hers finally rolled to a stop.

Rebecca rolled her eyes. “Don’t look so sorry about it. She’s better off without him, and she knows it.”

Well. We all knew that.

Thinking of Julia and James together made the discomfort in my stomach shift into queasiness, so I changed the subject. “You and Nina –“

“Oh, _now_ you want to talk about it.”

“I was going to say you should come out dancing.”

“With you?” Rebecca’s unimpressed once-over was hurtful but, I thought, fair.

“And a couple of guys I know. You’ll like them, I promise. Dominique’s a _great_ dancer.”

Nina was not sold on going to a gay club with two men she didn’t know and one she only barely did, so I evened out our party by cajoling Gabriele into coming along. It look a lot less cajoling than I would have thought; Gabriele was willing to do almost anything for a story.

“Should I take the left one out?” he mused, staring at the two piercings he had maintained much better than I had maintained mine while I waited by the door, resigned to another fifteen minutes of Gabriele rethinking his outfit. Sometimes I longed for the days of him mocking me for _my_ American fashion sense.

“Do what makes you happy,” I said, a non-answer intended to get us out the door before Sean could leave his room and see just how sheer my shirt was, and just how tight Gabriele’s pants.

“I want men to buy me drinks. Prove once and for all that I’m hotter than you without Oliver looming over you scaring away potential suitors.”

I had invited Oliver along as well, partly because Nina liked him but mostly because _I_ liked to watch him dance, but he had declined. I wouldn’t dance with anyone else if he was there, he pointed out, and that was not the point of clubbing. I would have pushed back against that, but the memory of our conversation at the villa forced me to give in, for just a little longer.

It reminded me, too, of my conviction to be myself without him. Maybe it was better if we didn’t dance together until I’d done that, too.

“You’re not hotter than me,” I said. “But ditch the earring.”

“Who won?” Oliver said, the next time I saw him, and “makes sense,” when I told him Gabriele. I thought I should probably be offended, but I was too pleased at hearing Oliver tease me to really be bothered.

With the finish line approaching at speed, everything that came next seemed to happen too quickly. I visited Oliver when I could, but we didn’t talk much; both of us were too busy. There wasn’t much to say, either; just an unspoken _when this is over._

Tommy cornered me during one of my food drop-offs and, in a halting way, thanked me for taking care of Oliver. “It’s good he has you,” he said, awkwardly reminiscent of Noah and Sharon trying to talk around what they believed Oliver and I to be.

I played dumb. “I’m sorry?”

Tommy huffed out a frustrated breath and refused to look me in the eye, but his voice was determined when he told me, “I think, when he and Nancy ended, he thought that was it for him.”

I didn’t reply. Tommy did meet my eye then, and I saw in his gaze the same question I had seen in so many other people’s, about me and about Oliver. This was Oliver’s friend, not mine; I wasn’t sure whether I had any right to answer at all, but Tommy said, “this isn’t a question, because I don’t want to know the answer. But you two… there’s something.”

That sounded like a question.

“I just wanted to have said it.”

 _It doesn’t mean anything_ , I wanted to scream, every time someone danced around the subject like this. _It’s none of your business, and it doesn’t change anything, so why do you care?_

“He’s just a normal guy,” I said.

“And so long as I live in ignorance I can keep believing that.”

One day in April, Izzy bounded into the apartment, ecstatic, with the news that she had been cast in some avant-garde off-Broadway production of a new play. “Turns out putting ‘conversational French and Italian’ on my resume was a great idea. Also, Peter and I are having a breakup party next week. Bring Oliver.”

Miraculously, I managed to drag Oliver away from his work long enough to attend, which was a good thing, because the party was mostly theater kids and he, Gabriele and I spent most of it backed against a wall while people talked about theorists and techniques and shows I had never heard of. I made the mistake of saying I had never seen a Broadway show and was immediately inundated with recommendations.

“Elio, you _philistine,”_ Gabriele said, all faux-dismay, and high-fived Oliver behind my back.

“I can’t believe you’re this happy about an impending breakup,” I said to Izzy, the one time she made it over to our little patch of wall. She shrugged.

“I’ll cry a lot about it when it actually happens, so I figured I should celebrate while I can still make light of it.”

That had been Julia’s motivation, too, and I envied the both of them the ability to live in the moment like that. I was still agonizing over how to break the news to Oliver that I would probably be leaving New York, at least for a little while.

I found Peter on my own, venturing into the kitchen on the pretense of grabbing some water but really just to escape the noise for a few minutes. He was leaned against the linoleum counter, pensive and at odds with the overall tone of the rest of the party.

“How are you feeling?”

He laughed, dry and perhaps a little choked, though I would never call him on it. “Like I could marry this girl, if the circumstances were different.”

I didn’t know what to say. Peter had always been my rock, always been there for me when I hadn’t known how to handle my own emotions. I had only ever known hm to be composed and self-aware. This new, vulnerable, defeated Peter was unfamiliar territory, and I didn’t know how to help besides hug him. So I did.

“Would you stay in New York?” he asked, muffled into my neck. “If I did?”

“Probably not.”

It was the first time I had said it out loud.

I felt his grin pressed against my shirt. “At least we’ll have each other. Nothing like a fake boyfriend to make you forget your real breakups.”

Oliver and I weren’t breaking up, of course, because we weren’t together. But it still _felt_ like a breakup, knowing that I would most likely return to Italy after graduating. Because the thing I wanted, the thing I _needed,_ was to know who I was when I wasn’t so fixated on him. And, deep down, I wanted to see if he would come after me.

I never had gotten the answers I wanted from Nicholas, and while I always had fun when I went out with him and Dominique, the questions I had originally planned to ask had been supplanted by new, more pressing ones.

“I don’t understand why you’re not asking Dom,” Nicholas said, pleading, stirring a pot of something mouthwateringly fragrant. Dominique was still at work, which was precisely why I had chosen that moment to ask, so that Nicholas couldn’t foist the questions off onto him. “I’m just going to second-guess all my answers.”

But that had been, and remained, the reason I wanted to ask Nicholas. I was a worrier, just like he was. I wasn’t confident in myself or secure in how the world perceived me, like Oliver and Dominique were.

I just wanted to know what it was like to live life in America as a gay man, so that I could know if it was something I thought I could do.

Nicholas looked surprised. “Were you considering doing something else?”

“You forget, I have options.” Although from what I had gleaned from Gabriele’s stories of returning over the summers, Italy wasn’t guaranteed to be any better.

“Do you think that would be better?” Nicholas said curiously, giving voice to my own uncertainty.

I had to think about it. “In Italy, I was never – I guess I don’t know how it would be, going back now. And New York has been – for me, at least, it’s felt safe. But I know it’s not.” Not for people like Nicholas and Oliver, and soon, with my bubble of understanding, loving friends soon to shrink and split off for Europe, for me.

Nicholas nodded, that speculative, pensive look I had become so accustomed to from him clouding his expression. He looked at his hands, gripped tight around the spoon. “Someone spit on me the other day. I was with Dom, and I guess we were walking too close, or maybe our hands brushed, or – and someone saw. And it wasn’t – we weren’t doing anything except walking. But he took offense, and… it could have been worse.”

I had expected as much. I had seen it with my own eyes, outside clubs and on the street. I’d experienced it myself, with James and even in some ways with Tommy. Could I weather that?

“But the thing that’s hardest,” Nicholas continued, still looking at his hands, “is that I feel like I’m holding him back. I think he’d wear skirts and heels every day, not just to clubs, if he thought it wouldn’t upset me. And I hate that I’m keeping him from being who he wants to be, I just – I just get so _scared._ I’m scared someone will take offense to that, and that one day he won’t come home.”

I didn’t know what to say. Nicholas finally looked up at me, and his eyes, I was shocked to see, were wet. “I think that’s how Oliver feels about you.”

After that, I stopped asking.

Oliver’s dissertation was approved, as my father had assured him it would be, and a number of us came to watch his defense, despite his protestations that it would only make him more nervous.

“Did you think I wasn’t going to come, after everything you did for me?” Gabriele said. Laurie said she would be there to take notes for her own eventual defense.

The relieved slump of Oliver’s shoulders when the _accepted, with minor revisions_ verdict came down was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I told him so, once the rest of the group had offered their conversations and drifted away to give us some time alone.

“Congratulations, Doctor Katz.”

Oliver laughed, cheeks going pink at the title. He had that look I loved, that joyous disbelief, and I didn’t even mind that this time it wasn’t about me. Anything that made Oliver look so happy was a cause for celebration in my book. “It’s not official yet. Still have to make those revisions.”

“I’m going back to Italy,” I said, abruptly, because if I didn’t say it then I never would, and I couldn’t have left without explaining why. “For a while, after I graduate. I don’t know how long.” And Oliver couldn’t come. He might have, if he didn’t have those revisions to do, and a dog to take care of, and a life to live in New York. He was not like me, twenty-two and free to explore the world. He was tethered.

I couldn’t let myself be tethered just yet.

I saw in the slump of his shoulders that he knew. He understood, and he didn’t blame me, and he wouldn’t stop me. It was still the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.

“I’ll see you soon,” I promised. “And if you don’t call my dad he might have a heart attack.”

Oliver arrived precisely on time to the performance of my concerto, but my attention was drawn to him so sharply that he might as well have walked in during the silence after a movement. He was always like that in my mind, as noticeable as applause before the end of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony. And his presence here was like that, a little, too; one small shock of sound into the vastness of silence and expectation before the slow, sweet fade-out of the violins. I couldn’t turn around and look at him.

The concerto itself was an homage to Bach, and to Oliver – subtle, but I knew, or hoped, that with the classical knowledge he had acquired during his time with Nancy he would hear the B flat four-B flat 5 repetition from the caprice he had loved back in Italy. The theme was similar, too: the departure of a loved one.

That was why I hadn’t let him hear it until this moment. If he had heard it earlier, he would have known.

Oliver barely looked at Gabriele after it was over, enveloping me in a hug fiercer than the one he had given me at the train station in B. before he left. When he tried to pull away, I pulled him back.

“Congratulations, Maestro Perlman,” he murmured, for my ears alone. For the first time, I heard someone say _Perlman_ and mean only me; not my father’s son, but _me,_ worthy of having a last name and a title all my own.

I laughed. “That one’s earned too.”

“And in my mind you’ve earned it.”

When he finally did pull back, it was to present me with what I hadn’t realized was clutched in his hand alongside the program: the postcard Maynard had given me and Oliver had taken with him when he left. “Thought you might want to put it up again.”

I didn’t want it. I wanted _him_ to have it, a reminder of me while I was away. I couldn’t put it back up on the wall of my room in the villa, because that would mean I was making a home there. That I was staying. And no matter what happened with Oliver, whether I came back to him or he came to find me, I didn’t want the villa to be my home anymore. I was a New York City boy through-and-through, and I couldn’t spend the rest of my life in a small, sleepy town.

“You keep it,” I said. “Hold on to it for me.”

Oliver’s face softened. We were alone, mostly, save a few stragglers headed for the door and a clump of my friends, standing several meters away and pretending not to watch us. It was as alone as we would ever be in public, and I was reminded, as I always was, of speaking to him in front of the post office in B. after the first night we’d spent together, or outside Daniel’s apartment when he’d told me to enjoy my life without him, or at Noah’s wedding as I realized we would never really be able to let each other go.

It was the closest we might ever get to what Nicholas believed Dominique deserved and what I desperately, desperately wanted.

“I think I’m about to make the third-biggest mistake of my life,” Oliver said. Always the rule of threes; that was how we did things. Three reasons why or why not, three mistakes, three summers in a row of false starts. Two tries, so far. Third time’s the charm.

“What was the second?”

“Walking away from you the first time.”

“And the first?”

“Letting you walk away from me now.”

“That’s a pretty tough act to follow. What’s the third, then?”

Oliver kissed me. Right there, in the open, in front of all our friends and the stage I’d imagined my music played on so many times.

Of course I kissed back.

It had been four and half years since he’d last kissed me, and nearly five since he’d kissed me and meant it. And still, everything about the kiss was as familiar as if it had been mere minutes. Oliver’s mouth against mine was achingly gentle, his hands still on my hips and slipping up beneath my suitjacket to hold my waist; quietly, secretly grounding me when I would have flown to pieces at his kiss otherwise.

It was nothing more than that. It couldn’t be, not with people watching us, and not with me leaving so soon. It couldn’t be more, and it could never be enough.

Oliver pulled away. I thought I heard Laurie wolf-whistle. “You aren’t the only one who can put on a show.”

“What was that? Not trying to make me stay, I hope?” Although as reasons to stay went, that was by far the most compelling anyone had given me so far.

Oliver smiled and shook his head. I had seen that combination of fondness and sorrow on Peter’s face only weeks before, and I couldn’t bear to see it on Oliver’s now. “Just a reminder.”

Of him, or of me?

“Of us.”

All of the giddy, confused energy left my body in a rush and I laughed, and if it came out a little hysterical, at least Oliver didn’t comment on it. He just kept smiling, and, for the first time in years, I thought back to my words to my father, when it had been Oliver leaving me and not the other way around.

_I think he was better than me._

It was I who didn’t deserve Oliver. I didn’t deserve his patience, not in this, and he gave it to me anyway.

“Did you really think I’d let you go without doing that at least once?” he said, and his gentle teasing had never ached so much.

I had, actually. But I was glad he hadn’t.

“I’m trying be braver. Taking a page out of your book.” Oliver stepped back and away from me, and for just a moment, his smile faltered and something unbearably sad shone through. I had broken his heart after all. “I trust you.”

I thought he meant it to mean _I trust you to come back when you’re ready,_ but he couldn’t quite mask the undercurrent of _I trust you to do what’s right for you, even if it means you never come back at all._

I couldn’t bring myself to answer, save our customary, tragic, ineffable _later._

“Goodbye, Elio.”

And he was gone.

Tommy peeled off from the huddle of onlookers to follow, a petulant “you just _had_ to ruin it for me” echoing behind them as the auditorium doors closed on Oliver’s hunched shoulders.

I blinked, fighting back tears I had no right to cry, as the one leaving him, and smoothed my suit jacket back into place. There was something flat and pointy in the inside breast pocket.

Oliver had slipped me the postcard, the sneaky bastard.

“Holy shit,” Gabriele breathed, coming to stand beside me and watch the door slowly swing shut. “Is it weird that _I’m_ heartbroken?”

Peter had a more forceful take on the situation. “I spent four years trying to get you to kiss him and that’s _it?”_

Well, if it was any consolation, I was a little heartbroken too.

I did my best not to think about the kiss, or about the look on Oliver’s face just before he’d turned around, as the semester drew to a close. Oliver seemed to be on the same wavelength, because I didn’t see him at all over the next week. I went to one last dinner at Kathleen’s, and Oliver didn’t come. My friends and I threw a series of helping-each-other-move parties, and Oliver didn’t come. We threw one large, final goodbye party, and Oliver didn’t come.

Laurie shrugged. “I tried,” she said. Too nosy for her own good, Dominique called her.

Izzy and Peter shared a tearful goodbye, and then Peter, Gabriele and I got drunk on schnapps couch for the last time – a fitting send-off before we passed ownership on to Sean, Peter declared, when Gabriele jostled my elbow and some of my wine sloshed onto the right cushion. It wouldn’t stain, but it was the thought that counted.

My parents arrived in time for graduation and invited Oliver to dinner once again, but he declined. “Did you have another fight?” my mother asked.

“No, we’ve just said our goodbyes.”

It was partially true.

Oliver did attend graduation itself and extended warm congratulations to all of my friends. Gabriele did the honors of bringing him to meet my parents, with a grandiose “this man is the reason I can read your books, Professor Perlman.”

“And the reason you have an insufferably large vocabulary,” Peter muttered. Oliver snorted.

“Thanks for coming,” I said quietly, though I was sure that Peter and Gabriele, at least, were listening intently enough to hear it.

Oliver’s voice was soft not out of discretion, I thought, but an aching tenderness I would never get tired of hearing. “I wouldn’t have missed it. If not to see you, then at least to bid this insouciant asshole good riddance,” he said, louder, to Gabriele’s chagrin.

I grinned at him, helpless, and he grinned back.

Maybe that kiss had been a mistake. But I wouldn’t have taken it back for the world, and mistake or not, it had done one thing: it had given me an anchor, something to remember when I doubted the depth of Oliver’s feelings for me or convinced myself I wasn’t strong enough to live my life out and proud like Dominique. It was something to come back to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who had "sleeper queer Rebecca" on their antepenultimate chapter bingo?
> 
> Dominique would probably identify as nonbinary or genderfluid today, but since it's the 80s that terminology is less well-established.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's here!!! The Final Reckoning. This is like the part of the symphony where all the instruments start playing at once and it's very sweeping and emotional
> 
> and also there's some tasteful (maybe?) sex, in case you are my father who reads my fics and want to proceed with caution

Peter stayed in New York for a few months, spending one last summer with his family and helping Liv move into the freshman dorms at Columbia before leaving for France. “I won’t sic her on Oliver,” he promised; “she can sniff him out herself.” Oliver was staying on as a post-doc fellow while he did the finishing touch-ups on his dissertation, and I didn’t envy him the office hours he was sure to lose to Liv’s starry-eyed presence.

Gabriele and I wandered Europe for the summer, one last hurrah before the start of real adult life in the fall. Gabriele’s accent had flattened out to the point where he sounded more Scandinavian than Italian, which I used to my full advantage when we spent a few days biking in Copenhagen by calling him _Gabe_ at opportune moments and watching locals turn frosty.

We visited Daniel and Anna in Germany, comfortably settled into academic life. “You’re a fucking idiot,” Daniel told me, “but it’s good to have you on this side of the Atlantic.”

We also visited Julia in Austria to hear her sing, but before we could reach the green room to congratulate her, I was stopped in the hallway by a jovial handshake from a man I quickly realized to be the conductor of the opera we had just seen.

“You are the pianist Julia speaks so highly of!” he enthused.

“Always second fiddle,” Gabriele muttered, but the idiom was lost in translation because the conductor turned to him with an equally enthusiastic, “you play as well?” and an offer to audition. Gabriele demurred, saying he had recently accepted a place with an orchestra in Milan, but he looked a little dumbstruck as we left. Music was all about who you knew, I reminded him. Juilliard had taught us that, at least.

Gabriele had to be in Italy by September first in time to begin rehearsals, so come the last week of August, we made our way back down to Milan. My parents had offered Gabriele a place in our townhouse until he got his feet under him, which he accepted readily, and sharing my childhood bedroom with him felt a little like the slightly more grown-up version of rooming with Peter in our first year at Juilliard.

I spent the autumn composing, playing small gigs, and spending time with Gabriele when he wasn’t busy with rehearsal. He had settled into life in Milan easily and adult responsibility suited him well, but I couldn’t help but feel left behind. I still felt restless, unsatisfied, and I wasn’t even sure what I was doing there. Finding myself? Making a point? If so, to whom?

Mostly, though, I tried and failed not to miss New York.

“I don’t get you,” Gabriele said. “You have all these opportunities to be happy, and all you ever do is run from them. You create your own problems.” I could tell he only criticized because he didn’t know how else to help, but his analysis of the situation still stung.

Gabriele moved into his own apartment in November, and I crashed on his couch while my parents stayed at the villa for the holidays. I wasn’t quite ready to face it without Oliver there.

In January, a small composition of mine got published, and I endured several weeks of Gabriele badgering me to dedicate it to Oliver before we both realized there would be no dedication at all. I was only temporarily off the hook, he warned me. There would be other pieces, and he was very persistent. I didn’t waste my breath arguing.

Oliver really could call me _maestro_ now, I thought. I wondered if his students at Columbia called him _doctor_. He had always been so casual with me and my friends; it was odd to imagine him as the stuffy professor he liked to joke about being.

I did get updates on Columbia from Laurie, though she was careful not to say too much about Oliver, to my frustration. “His phone number hasn’t changed,” she said. “I’m not going to enable your stubbornness; I’ve got things to do.” She had been accepted to a masters program at Yale, studying literature from the Roman Republic, and her new protégé Liv was distraught to see her go.

“I know of a really cool summer program for young academics,” I offered. Laurie laughed and hung up on me.

In May, I got the call from Daniel that he and Anna were engaged and expected me to have a piece for violin and piano done by the time they got around to actually getting married, whenever that turned out to be, and I couldn’t be anything but thrilled for them.

I was coming up on a year of my self-imposed exile form Oliver, and the longer it went on, the sillier I felt about it. Gabriele was right; I had run from New York just like I’d run from Italy five years before, just like I’d accused Oliver of running from me. And once I’d reached what I thought was safety, I’d been too embarrassed by my flight to admit I’d done it at all.

I wanted to tell Oliver all this, to say that he had been right to trust me after all and wrong to give back my postcard, but each time I called, my calls went to his answering machine.

Laurie was suspiciously cagey when I asked about it.

With no way to contact Oliver and possessed with a new determination to stop running from things that scared me, I finally accepted my parents’ invitation to the villa for the summer. I still didn’t feel ready to face it, but I couldn’t reasonably put it off any longer, particularly after Gabriele told me he’d give me the silent treatment all summer if I stayed in Milan, moping around his apartment and making _him_ depressed just looking at me.

The villa in summer was much as I remembered it – very little seemed to change, in those sleepy Italian towns. I biked and swam and read and wrote music, and if I forgot everything about the past five years I could tell myself it was just another summer like all the summers before it. But I had spent those five summers away, and _I_ had changed. _Idyllic_ wasn’t what I wanted for my life anymore.

Some things had changed along with me, most notably the fact that Marzia was now married to someone I had never met and had been for several years. “God save me from young people getting married,” I told Emily, now a medical resident, over the phone.

“Just let me know if you’ve got any weddings you need me to crash,” she said. Nothing on the horizon, but I’d keep her posted in case anything came up, I promised.

Still, idyllic boredom was in some ways preferable to the dread I felt at the prospect of living with this year’s subletter. I had missed the selection process since I had stayed with Gabriele in December, and my parents refused to tell me anything about them, save my father’s promise that I would like this one.

Peter made it up from France for the week before the subletter was to arrive, and I let his presence push those worries from my mind. It was nice to be able to show him around _my_ family’s home, show him all of my favorite places and things to do as if we were stupid teenagers again. The week passed too quickly for my tastes, but professional musicians had more exacting schedules than wealthy composers, he said.

I dropped Peter at the station in B. myself and, as he exited the car, presented him with one perfect, home-grown peach “for the road.”

“You’re a sick fuck, Perlman,” he said fondly. “Call more often.”

I made my slow, reluctant way back to the villa, dreading what bright-eyed twenty-five-year-old philosopher might await me in the foyer when I got there. Sure enough, as I pulled into the gate my headlights were reflected back into my vision by the shine of another car. That was odd; usually my father’s guests arrived by taxi, and there was no reason to keep a car in B. if you only planned to stay a few months. But then, if I had learned anything about Americans, ti was that they loved their cars.

Not a New Yorker, at least. No self-respecting person from New York City would rent a car to drive around Italy. That was some small comfort.

I had so completely convinced myself of this that I was totally unprepared to step over the threshold and come face-to-face with a very, _very_ familiar New Yorker.

“What are you doing here?” was, regrettably, the first thing out of my mouth. Not _I tried to call_ , or _it’s good to see you,_ not the things I should have said, but that curt, ungentle ambush of a greeting.

Oliver didn’t seem to mind. He smiled at me like I had never run from him, like neither of us had ever done anything to make this reunion awkward. “Well, I’m writing a book, and I have to admit I’m completely stuck.”

“We thought it was time we picked a subletter and settled down,” my mother joked, so thinly veiled it might as well have been nude. I didn’t know what to say in response to either of them.

Seeing Oliver again had made me so tongue-tied that all I could do was help him carry his luggage upstairs and stare wonderingly at his ascending figure. There was a lot more luggage than the last time he’d stayed, which probably explained the car but raised several other questions. I would have asked them, but at that moment the dinner bell rang and Oliver gave me a crooked smile as he headed back down, so I resigned myself to waiting.

Oliver disappeared after dinner, and I followed my hunch down to the rocks overlooking the water and the glittering lights of E. Oliver was sat on the pebbled shore, knees drawn up to his chest, chin resting on his folded arms. My feet crunched along the beach as I approached, but he didn’t look up.

“It’s strange to think she’s not here,” he said, and he didn’t have to elaborate. “Nothing else has changed, but I can’t wrap my head around the fact that tomorrow I’ll come down here to read and she won’t join me.”

I understood. I hadn’t been close with Vimini like Oliver had, but there were things I expected, things I remembered, things that every time I turned around and saw they weren’t there anymore felt like a kick in the chest. This place might not have changed, but the people in it had. Including us.

Oliver watched the lights of E. flickering in the twilight haze, and I watched him. He had always needed the cloak of darkness to say things like this, needed the silence and stillness of evening to lay himself bare, to let himself be seen.

“I didn’t want to stay away. If I hadn’t ruined things with you, I would have come back every summer and just done this, if I could.” He laughed, then, and when he looked at me his eyes were bright with tears he had shed before I got there, I thought. “But then maybe you wouldn’t have run away to New York, and I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to fix things.”

There wouldn’t have been anything to fix, I pointed out. But he was right. If he hadn’t kissed me in December, if he’d broken things off with Nancy and come back in July a free man, maybe I wouldn’t have fled. Or maybe I would have followed him.

“To learn you better, then,” he said. “To become someone worthy of being your friend, maybe.”

 _Friends._ Was that all we were? Had my final flight, after he’d kissed me and put his heart on the line and I hadn’t said anything in return cemented us into that platonic sphere forever? If that was the case, it was my own fault and I would have to live with it. But I couldn’t let it leave Oliver thinking I didn’t care about him.

I came to sit beside him. “You already know I think you are.”

“Your leaving and not speaking to me for a year says otherwise,” he said archly, and my heart sang to know that, year of radio silence or not, we could pick up that teasing camaraderie again like we’d never dropped it. Although the content of his sentence told me he _did_ think I didn’t care about him. Just a little bit.

“I left because –“ I started.

“I know why you left.”

Did he, I wondered. Did he know I’d just done what he’d always told me I should do? I had finally come around to his point of view, just in time to do something about it, but not in time to explain what I was doing. That was my mistake, too.

Oliver turned back to face the tide, his smile shaded with regret in the wavering blue glow. “I used to sit out here alone every night and think of you. All the reasons I wanted you, and all the reasons I shouldn’t go for it. And then you came to New York and I could have had you, and I still didn’t. It wasn’t until you were almost gone that I realized what a fucking idiot I’d been to wait.”

Well. _I’d_ known he was an idiot all along.

Oliver laughed, knocking our shoulders together, and didn’t shift away. “You’re no picnic yourself.”

“Sorry, I didn’t understand your American idiom,” I said, laughing and shoving him back. “Could you call me an asshole a little differently?” And it should have prompted a joke in return from Oliver, probably in Italian, but my shove had caught him off-balance and he had tilted dangerously towards the ground, and with the touch of my steadying arm to his bicep the atmosphere between us changed.

I pulled him back upright, and then I kept going until I couldn’t anymore, until we were so close that I had to crane my neck to the side to look at him, his arm escaping my grip to land on the rocks behind him, grounding.

“I’ll call you much worse than that if you don’t kiss me right now,” he said. Then he lowered his eyes, unsure, and said, to somewhere in the vicinity of my shoulder, “that was out of line. I shouldn’t have – I don’t expect –“

“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” I told him.

His eyes darted back up to mine in surprise, probably trying to decipher whether that meant he should or he shouldn’t, and whatever he saw in them made a smile creep over his face. “Don’t have to tell me twice,” he said, which was demonstrably untrue, but I couldn’t point that out to him because he pushed himself off the ground, took my face in both hands, and, after a brief transparently incredulous look, kissed me.

We might have finally come crashing back together, I thought, surging forward to wrap my arm around his shoulders and kiss him back, but we could never be anything but gentle with each other. Oliver’s hands were warm on my chilled face, his mouth even warmer on mine as he took my lower lip between his teeth and tugged, and I let myself melt.

“You have stubble,” he said, mumbled into my mouth, nearly incomprehensible.

“Yes, yes, I couldn’t grow a beard until I was twenty-one, thank you for bringing it up,” I groused, but Oliver silenced my complaining by taking advantage of my opened mouth to slip his tongue inside, hot and so wonderfully familiar against my own. How could I have lived six years of my life without doing this? How was it possible then that I remembered it so well, as if the last time we had done it was only an hour past?

Oliver pulled away to nuzzle his cheek alongside mine, and the scrape of it still made me weak. “I like it. You should grow a beard.”

“You definitely don’t want that. You might think you do, but you don’t.”

“I’ll never know unless you grow one,” he argued, and there was something beautiful in the fact that we couldn’t even kiss anymore without breaking it off to tease each other. I supposed that meant we really were equals now. Or, better yet, true friends who just happened to like each other as more than that. But there had to be _at least_ an equal proportion of kissing and teasing. I turned my head and caught his lips again.

The night had turned cold and I hadn’t put on a jacket before I’d gone after Oliver, and soon enough I began to shiver. I would have tried to hide it, except that that would have meant leaving Oliver’s embrace, and I wasn’t about to do that.

Oliver cupped my jaw with one palm, as if that would stop my teeth chattering. It didn’t, but the gesture was unbearably sweet. “That seems like a sign to go back in,” he said, low and amused, and didn’t take his arm from my waist as we picked our way across the beach towards the villa.

Oliver wasn’t wearing shoes, I realized, as he stumbled and hissed, and when he pulled away from me to look at the bottom of his foot, it was bleeding. “Shit. Shell or something.” So then it was my turn to support Oliver with my arm around his waist, like I’d led him to his bedroom when he’d been so sick – only now we were heading to a very different bedroom under a very different set of circumstances.

I managed to haul a limping Oliver up the stairs without tracking too much blood through the house and deposited him on my bed while I went to the bathroom to rummage for band-aids and disinfectant. Oliver submitted to the care without protest, eyes dark and focused on my head where it was bent over his foot. The parallel was unnerving.

But he didn’t say anything, and I still wasn’t sure where we stood, and I wasn’t about to do anything he didn’t want to do, so I turned to leave. Oliver’s whisper stopped me.

“Oliver,” he murmured, like he was testing it out. Then he grinned. “Oliver, Oliver, _Oliver_. Feels good to say it.”

I stilled, back thankfully turned to him so he couldn’t see my stricken face. This… was a precipice, and I wasn’t sure we should leap off it. Kissing him on the beach was one thing, just like him kissing me after my recital had been. Hearing him say his name as if it were mine, in my old bedroom – _his_ bedroom – when we had seemingly finally crashed back into each other… was it wise?

Or was I just too cautious? Was I holding back just like Oliver was so fond of doing, just because I was afraid of messing things up? I hadn’t wanted to sleep in that bed with him because it brought back too many memories of the first real heartbreak I’d ever experienced; did I want to _sleep_ with him in it? Mightn’t this be better saved for another time, in a hotel in Rome or his apartment in Manhattan or somewhere other than this place where we never could be anything other than what we had been?

“I’m not sure we should do this. You’re here, and that’s fine – more than fine; I’m glad you came,” I hurried to correct, just in case he thought I really didn’t want him there. “I just –“

I expected him to back down the way he always did. Instead, he rose from the bed, favoring his injured foot, to put his hand on my waist and turn me to face him. He would always be taller than me, even though I had grown several inches in university, and looking up into his face, I couldn’t remember any reason why we _hadn’t_ been doing this all along.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

What? What did he mean?

“Hear me out.”

I fumbled behind me to shut the door, incapable of looking away from him. I thought maybe he would kiss me again, but of course he wouldn’t; we hadn’t talked about this, and I knew Oliver counted that as one of the greatest mistakes he had made with me the first time around. So I let myself be led back to the bed and stood before him, hovering awkwardly, uncertain whether I should sit beside him or stand.

“If you want to do this another time, or not at all, that’s okay. I don’t even have to stay, if you want this bed back. I’ve been in Rome for the past five weeks; I can head back there and figure something out. But if you do want me here –“

“I don’t want you to leave again.” That, at least, I was certain of. Not _I want you here, now, for the night or the week or the summer;_ I wanted him with me until one or the other of us couldn’t stand it anymore. I wanted us to stop running away.

“I left Columbia,” he said.

I sat. “What?”

Oliver shrugged, calculatedly casual. His thigh pressed against mine with the dip of the bed under our combined weights, but our elbows barely brushed before his hands were back in his lap, as if that was at all like the way he usually sat and not a studied attempt not to spook me. Again. “I spent eight years there. It got a little old.”

“That doesn’t bode well for your future as a tenured professor.”

My heart was jackrabbiting in my chest, so loud I was sure Oliver could hear it, or feel it, thrumming through my veins with the excitement of _finally finally finally._ This was going to happen, and we were only prolonging it with conversation as a kind of foreplay, because that was how we did things. We talked and talked in circles until we couldn’t circle around it anymore and had to face it outright. _It_ had never amounted to anything before, but Oliver’s voice was so lilting and so warm that it couldn’t amount to anything other than what I hoped it would.

“Maybe I need someone around to keep it interesting,” he said, eyes dark.

I skated my fingers along the crease between our thighs, feeling his pulse jump, and turned his hand palm-up in his lap so I could trace circles into it, light and casual, just like he had tried to be with me. “What will you do?”

Oliver’s voice was unsteady and his fingers spasmed under my touch as he said, “I’ve been offered an adjunct position at Hofstra.”

“Will you take it?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

I saw the smile playing at his lips and I knew, deeply and assuredly, that there was nothing stopping us. The only thing between us was air, and soon not even that. “What’s stopping you?” I asked, tugging his hand towards me until he was forced to turn, to pull one knee up onto the bed so he faced me entirely, coy smile and laughing eyes trained fully on me.

Oliver went. His hand in mine sent sparks up my arm as he turned it, lacing our fingers together, his thumb brushing the faintest of caresses over mine. “It’s pretty far from Milan.”

“Yeah?” I whispered, breathless as he leaned towards me, inexorable and helpless not to sway forwards in answer. “That’s a shame. I was thinking of moving back to New York part-time.”

“Which part?”

I only just managed to say, “September to June, mostly,” before his lips finally met mine and there was nothing more to say at all.

I had been wrong, down on the rocks. We could be something other than gentle with each other, because this _was_ anything but – fierce and longing, the culmination of years of wanting and not reaching out. Maybe public sex just wasn’t our thing, I thought. But in private – Oliver worked with a singular focus, tearing his mouth away from mine only long enough to strip us both of our shirts before he pushed me down onto the bed, blanketing my body with his, and kissed me harder than I’d ever been kissed in my life.

Things became a blur. We were naked, somehow, and Oliver’s mouth was on my neck, and I barely even cared that my parents would be able to look at us in the morning and know exactly what had happened. They would probably be relieved. They’d planned this whole thing, after all, kept it a secret from me for six months; I’d wager they made all the arrangements themselves, taken care of all his –

“Paul,” I gasped, and Oliver pressed his forehead to my collarbone and laughed helplessly.

“ _That’s_ what you’re thinking about right now? I can’t believe Tommy was right.” But I tugged on his hair until he looked up at me and rolled his eyes. “With Laurie. He’ll be thrilled to have you back.”

“Oh, _he’ll_ be thrilled,” I drawled, and somehow without my notice my grip on his hair had turned into a caress, smoothing it down behind his ears, making his eyes flutter shut. Alright, fine, he’d be thrilled too.

I left my hand in his hair as he slowly kissed from my chest down my stomach and to my thighs, avoiding the one place I most wanted his mouth. I didn’t tighten my grip, didn’t force him, but my thighs tensed in telltale anticipation and he laughed anyway.

“Next time,” he promised, laughing again as I whined – partly in thwarted desire, but more out of the heady knowledge that there _would_ be a next time, and a time after that, and on and on until we were both too old to get it up anymore. “I’ve been hoping you’d let me fuck you again for four years.”

Oh, yes, good plan. A much better plan. I’d wanted it too – maybe not for four years, but ever since I’d waken up at Peter’s house on that awful air mattress with Oliver’s cock pressed against me. I’d _ached_ to have it inside me, or, frankly, even just near me.

“But I don’t know,” Oliver continued, brows arched, as he traced one finger along the crease of my thigh, “I’ve heard rumors that you’ve been disparaging it; I don’t know if I want to expose myself to that kind of criticism.”

“You are a bastard and a tease,” I told him, “and if you don’t want me to say very mean things about your dick to everyone we know you had better put it to good use.”

Oliver complied with gratifying eagerness and speed, and I consoled myself that _next time_ I would make him take his time, take me apart before he was even inside me, but for now neither of us had the patience to wait that long. We’d waited long enough already. He nudged my hip, encouraging me to turn over, but there was no _way_ I was going to do this for the first time in six years and not look him in the eye.

Oliver’s grin, his flushed face and lust-bright eyes, told me he agreed, that he’d just been checking. “Use your words,” I admonished him, though my own transformed into a yelp as he guided himself into me.

“Pushy. I,” he began, punctuating each word with an incremental thrust of his hips, “have wanted you since the day I met you.” They were the words I had ached to hear for so long, and even cliché as they were with him buried inside of me, my heart still soared at finally hearing them.

“What took you so long?”

He dipped his head down to kiss me again. “I’m not very intelligent.” He thrust his hips, just once, knocking my breath from me, and took the opportunity to ask me a question when he knew damn well I couldn’t answer. “What took _you_ so long?”

“you lived twenty-four years of your life without me,” I answered, forced to gasp it the way I knew he had wanted, “I had to try to do the same.”

Oliver’s whole weight pressed me to the bed and I could barely _think_ , had to grasp my scattered thoughts and hold them in the hopes that I would have the wherewithal to reply to his “you were never really without me.”

“Like a burr in my saddle,” I agreed, half-delirious.

Oliver laughed – it was wonderful to hear, but I really wished he’d stop laughing and just _fuck me_ , or at least fuck me _while_ he laughed – and started up a slow, torturous rhythm. “That’s the most American thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“ _Please_ stop talking and just fuck me,” I managed, as he began to move in earnest, and then, thankfully, he went blessedly quiet as both of us became mostly incapable of saying anything coherent.

The only thing of note that filtered into my consciousness, slipping past the haze of pleasure and joy and Oliver’s teeth on the bared column of my neck, was that his repeated, growled litany of profanities contained only _my_ name.

“Not _Oliver?”_ I managed, on a hitching breath, and it took him several seconds to understand the question. When understanding came, he shook his head, sweaty hair flopping across his forehead and into his eyes blown wide and dark.

“I like your name. I like that I’m here with _you.”_

Of course; we were different people than we had been when he’d first said _call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine._ He was not molding me into someone like him; we had come to each other as we were, and by calling me by my own name he was saying _here I am, and here you are, and I want you for all the things you are and all the ways we are different. I want_ you.

And then he thrust one final time and the only word on my lips was _Oliver._

The next morning, my parents politely pretended not to notice the bruise on my neck or the way Oliver and I smiled stupidly at each other every time our eyes met, but they did look irritatingly pleased with themselves. I grumbled about it; Oliver said we should send them a fruit basket.

“With what fruit? Anchise would take it as a grave insult.”

“Apples, obviously. And by then we’ll be far enough away that he can’t do anything about it.”

The summer passed just as it had six years ago, languorous and sun-soaked and perfect, and this time there was no looming end-date to haunt the lengthening August shadows. Just the promise of something else, something new, a chapter of my life that was not so much a shift as a settling-in to what had always been there. I thought, sometimes, about the boy I had been and what he might have thought of my life now. If he could have imagined a life like this at all.

I was almost as old as Oliver had been back then. And he was right; we wouldn’t have worked, if he’d stayed, when I was still a child in so many ways and he was still trapped in his own fears. One could argue that I’d grown out of my impediment before he’d grown out of his, but whenever I tried he only laughed and kissed me.

“Do you think we wasted all those years?” I would ask, flat on my back in the grass by the berm, Oliver’s legs tangled with mine and his hair tickling the side of my neck.

“Never.” Then he would raise his head, and the seriousness in his eyes would last only so long as it took for me to smile at him and him to smile back. “So long as you stay with me for the rest of them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elio and Oliver are me because I am incapable of _shutting the fuck up_ in any and all situations. But really, if you're not laughing during sex then what kind of boring sex are you having?
> 
> Anyway I wrote this sex scene in like a fever dream because as I said I hate writing them, so I hope it was... good? Not horribly cringe?


	21. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy valentines day.

“Fucking _finally,”_ Gabriele said irritably, as we walked into his apartment holding hands. Oliver and I just grinned at each other, which seemed to irritate him even more.

 _“You,”_ he accused, pointing at Oliver, “let him mope around my apartment for eight months and you mean to tell me that for seven of them you were just biding your time to come here for some timed grand gesture? Party foul.”

Oliver shrugged. “Go big or go home.”

“Go home, right now. This is my apartment and I’m not about to let you two have sex on my couch.”

“No Mahler this time?”

Gabriele made an affronted noise, as if the habit wasn’t one he himself had cultivated. Then he sniffed, superior, and informed Oliver that they had been playing Holst lately, so. Oliver said he wasn’t sure he could get it up to _Mars, the Bringer of War._

“That’s the idea,” Gabriele grumbled. He looked to me, then, and I saw that beneath his prickly, playacted affront, he was sad. He looked like the Gabriele I had first met, who put up acerbic walls to protect himself from uncertainty and disappointment. “So you’re leaving, then.”

“Only temporarily,” I promised him.

He’d have to settle for that, he supposed. But we had to come back, because his English would grow rusty without Oliver around to talk to – “because your Italian still sucks.”

“Thank you very much,” Oliver said dryly.

We had dawdled too long at the villa and classes at Hofstra began in a week, which meant we had no time to visit our other friends across the continent, but I received congrats calls in short order from Anna, Julia, and Peter. Anna’s and Julia’s both amounted mostly to a squabble over whose _fuck him for me_ had done the trick, in response to which I had to regretfully inform them that I hadn’t thought about _either_ of them. Daniel called the next day to apologize for “how fucking weird my fiancée is.”

Liv was heartbroken that Oliver wouldn’t be returning to Columbia, Peter said, but his parents extended their love and what he thought was probably also a veiled congratulations. “You weren’t subtle, at my house,” he said, “and I think they heard Liv whining about it and extrapolated. Also, I forgot to tell you, but while I was in New York last summer I cleared out a bunch of stuff from the garage and I’m pretty sure that second air mattress was fine, so. Make of that what you will.”

I did recall, come to think of it, my mother and Margaret conferencing over the phone before we caught the train upstate. Perhaps she’d had more warning than Peter had thought she had. But that was weird and didn’t bear thinking about, so I chalked it up to the rubber re-sealing itself, or something equally as implausible as my parents conspiring to force Oliver and I into sharing a mattress.

Back in New York, we got dinner with Nicholas and Dominique, to Laurie’s unending jealousy. “You wait until I’ve _left the state_ to become friends with my brother?”

“We thought you’d gone for good,” Dominique said, and I told him I’d thought so myself, sometimes. But New York had a certain draw to it, and in my opinion, once you’d lived there for long enough it was hard to live anywhere else. Cheers to that, Dominique said.

Nicholas took me aside. “So you decided it was worth it after all.”

I supposed I had. But in the end the decision hadn’t come down to whether I thought I was strong enough to live out and proud in New York City – and really, if not New York then where else – it had been whether I wanted Oliver in my life badly enough to try it. And of course the answer to that question was yes.

Nicholas grinned. “That’s the conclusion I thought you’d come to.”

He could have _told_ me; would have saved me a lot of agonizing two years ago.

Life became routine. I dragged Oliver to see Izzy in a production of _The Threepenny Opera_ that later went on to Broadway after being entirely recast, and refused to see it _on_ Broadway in solidarity – which turned out to be misplaced, because Izzy went anyway to maintain professional connections.

I wasn’t sure what _I_ wanted to do, professionally. Oliver and I had rented a slightly larger apartment on Long Island which I had made sure could accommodate a piano, so I gave lessons to supplement Oliver’s small adjunct salary and let my young students entertain Paul when they lost focus. I was still composing, of course, but I hadn’t yet figured out _exactly_ what I wanted to do with that.

Give it time, Oliver said. I wasn’t even twenty-five; there was no rush.

I had spent my whole adult life rushing, it felt, ever since I had arrived in New York and had to sprint to catch up to the faster-paced American way of doing things. Sitting back and waiting for things to come to me was not something I was used to doing. But sitting back and waiting had brought Oliver back to me, so I supposed I could give it a shot.

In December, Oliver and I headed back to Italy for a few weeks, and this time we brought Peter along with us. Gabriele bemoaned his packed holiday concert schedule, but he was fooling no one; it was clear he adored being an orchestral musician and much preferred it to sitting around a fire every night for two weeks straight.

It had been a full seven years since our disastrous kiss there before everything fell apart, and I felt the full weight of those years when Peter, on seeing our shared-wall rooming configuration, rolled his eyes and said, “I’ll just wear earplugs, shall I?”

“No Pet Shop Boys here,” Oliver agreed.

“Headphones, maybe,” I suggested. “Gabriele could send you a recording.”

It was a good weight, I decided. Those years had brought me Peter and Gabriele and hundreds of little jokes, and they had allowed me to fold Oliver into that life and into those jokes much more fully than I could have if we had always been together. I had been myself without him for almost as long as he had been himself without me, and I would be forever grateful for it.

Peter rolled his eyes again, fonder this time. “Fine. But I kissed him first.”

“No you didn’t,” Oliver and I said, together.

“Come on, let me have this,” Peter said, but he didn’t complain _too_ much about the tiny bed or the fact that Oliver and I almost certainly disturbed his sleep. Best brother and best ex-fake boyfriend ever, I assured him.

And if on one of those nights Oliver declined sex and just held me and told me, very seriously, that he loved me, Peter didn’t say anything about the fact that he had probably heard me cry.

Anna and Daniel had picked a date for their wedding, because “why wait, honestly?” and I had to agree. I had thought they reminded me of an old married couple over a year ago; they weren’t going to become any _less_ like one if they put it off.

But it shook me. Anna and Daniel had been together for five years; of course it made sense for them to get married. Oliver and I hadn’t even been together for one. And there was no _reason_ to tie him to me, no need to, but sometimes when we ate dinner with Nicholas and Dominique I would catch glimpses of a ring on their hands and wonder. What would it be like, to walk around with a physical reminder of Oliver on my finger at all times? Would Oliver even want that, after his engagement to Nancy had ended so poorly?

“I thought you were anti-marriage,” Oliver said, clearly surprised, when I broached the question. I had made it my goal to be as honest with him as I could, since he had made it his goal to always be honest with me. I wasn’t as good at it as he was, yet; I still struggled to untangle my emotions sometimes and was always afraid of saying something that might turn out not to be true later.

I didn’t know that I _wasn’t,_ precisely. I just wanted to know what he thought.

Oliver laughed at that, but he did take a moment to think about it. “I’m yours for however long you’re willing to put up with me,” he said, choosing his words. “Non-binding marriage or no. And I don’t think I’d want to wear a ring – too many questions, and I’m not ready to face those yet. But if you wanted to write vows, or something, at some point… I’d like that.”

“You don’t _have_ to go for that sort of heterosexual happy ending,” Nicholas told me when I asked his advice, which he was resigned to giving me by then, “but that’s kind of the beauty of it. It can be whatever you want it to be.”

I wanted it to be whatever Oliver wanted it to be. I just wanted him with me, and whatever sort of promises made him happy, I was content with. There was one thing I wanted to do, though.

Noah was understandably confused to receive my call, and for the first several minutes of it seemed to think something horrible had happened to Oliver and I was there to give him the bad news. I just wanted to let him know that Oliver would probably be holding a small commitment ceremony in the near future, I explained for the third time.

“That’s… wonderful news,” Noah said, sounding as though he would have preferred to hear that Oliver was dead. “I remember you requesting the first dance with Lindsey, I think? Is that still on?”

Unfortunately, I told him, I’d promised the first dance to Oliver.

It wasn’t true, and I didn’t _need_ a first dance or any of those other traditional trappings of a straight wedding, but I thought maybe Oliver would appreciate if he family thought he had them.

“I really don’t care, but I would have paid money to see his face when you told him,” Oliver said, but the way he had kissed me the minute I set down the phone told me he appreciated it.

Though the possibility of something with Oliver was still up in the air, come June, everyone who could afford the airfare arrived in Bremen, more or less prepared for the first college-friends-getting-married wedding most of us had attended. Watching Izzy and Peter dance around each other reminded me of myself and Oliver, but Peter was resolute: they had separate career trajectories, and neither of them wanted to tie each other down.

Maybe someday, though. He wasn’t as good at waiting as I was, but maybe someday.

“Is Izzy good at waiting?” I pointed out.

He grinned. “Not at all. _I’m_ just waiting for her to find someone who makes her happy so I can move on.”

True to my word, I had composed a small piece for violin and piano, which Peter and Gabriele performed beautifully. Anna cried much more than the piece deserved, I thought, but it was her wedding so I didn’t question it. Brides tended to make me nervous.

It wasn’t because brides made me nervous but so as not to be tacky that I waited a day before I approached Anna Glaser-Wright – and wasn’t that a trip, I thought – to ask a question that I suspected might be tacky anyway.

“Since we’re all here,” I began, “would it be stepping on your toes if –“

Anna cut me off, a terrifyingly gleeful light in her eyes. “Oh my god. Is this a double wedding? You want to share your wedding with me?”

Oliver and I couldn’t legally get married, I pointed out, but if we were to do some sort of commitment ceremony thing – not a big thing; we didn’t have rings or anything, but just a small celebration…

“I don’t care,” Anna said firmly. “I’m calling it a wedding, and yes _absolutely_ we can share a weekend. Julia will be furious.”

No promises, I told her. I had to ask Oliver first.

 _“Now?”_ he said, incredulous. “You want me to write a vow in the next twenty-four hours?”

I mean, he didn’t have to. I just thought it would be nice, with our friends there.

Oliver’s eyes softened. “I’ve always thought of them as your friends. People who put up with having me around because _you_ put up with having me around.”

Well, _that_ was stupid. Of course they were Oliver’s friends. And the beauty of it was, of course, that we could do this as many times as we wanted. If he wanted to go back to Vermont and affirm our relationship in front of all his awful family and make Lindsey cry, we could still do that. I just wanted to do it now, in front of these people.

“You’re still a monster,” Oliver told me. “If you want to, of course I will.”

Daniel was good-humored as always when I asked him, though he said he wished I’d asked him first so he could have broken the news to Anna in a way that sounded less like ‘sharing a wedding.’ But wasn’t it kind of fitting that it was the four of us doing the sharing? After all, we had basically introduced each other.

It was fitting, I agreed, and thank you so much for being a good sport about it. There was just one thing left to do.

I wasn’t sure if the phone number I had would even still work after a year of no contact, but I shouldn’t have worried. What I _should_ have remembered was that it was five in the morning in Seattle.

“Hello?” Emily said, groggy. “Who are you and why the hell are you calling me at five in the morning on my one day off rotation?”

“I’m getting married,” I said. I knew she would know who I was.

That woke her up. “What? No way. You’re not thirty yet.”

“He is. And he’s a doctor.”

“Very funny. I can’t believe you woke me up for a practical joke,” Emily groused, but when I didn’t laugh or say anything to confirm that, she spoke again, shocked. “Wait, you’re kidding, right? You’re getting married? You’re gay? _Can_ you even get married?”

“Well, not married,” I said, hearing an echo of Nicholas’ words to me on the day I had first realized it _was_ possible to be stable and happy even if the world around you thought you didn’t deserve to be, “but we’re taking each other’s names.” A private joke, and not quite true, but close enough to the truth.

I thought Emily whistled, but it didn’t come across very well over a long-distance call, so it could have been a yawn. “Wild. I expect you to tell me all about it at a more _reasonable hour._ And congratulations, by the way. Let me know when you decide to renew your vows and I’ll come crash them.”

Would do, I promised. Maybe we’d hold a ceremony just for her.

Oliver knocked on the doorframe.

It was ridiculous to be nervous; it was just us standing in front of our friends and saying we loved each other. We’d barely even written anything, because Oliver had complained it was short notice and he couldn’t do me justice. But standing there, saying it out loud when for so long I’d kept it to myself – even until just recently – was frightening. In a good way, I thought, but still frightening.

But Oliver’s hand was warm and grounding on back and his kiss was sweet as he replaced the phone on the hook for me, pushing me back into the wall for just a moment before we had to go outside and face the world. Life would be full of fewer moments like these as the years went on, as our careers took off and adult responsibilities truly kicked in. I would savor every one of them that I got to have now.

“I love you,” Oliver murmured against my lips.

I laughed. “You’re supposed to wait until we’re outside to say that.”

“I’ll say it again,” he protested, kissing me once more like he couldn’t help himself. “But that’s for all them. This one’s just for us.”

Such a sap. I loved him for it, though, and I didn’t tell him that enough. “Then I love you too.”

Oliver hummed a little pleased sound that always made me melt a little. I had made him so unhappy for so long; the fact that I could now make him happy with so little never failed to thrill me, and I would never take it for granted. I smoothed his hair back into place and laced my fingers with his, pulling us away from the wall and towards the door and the small garden where all of our friends were waiting. “Shall we, Doctor Perlman?”

Oliver held my hand, smiled blindingly, and stepped with me into the sunlight. “Ready when you are, Maestro Katz.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, there it is. This sprawling monstrosity is officially finished! Thank you all SO much for coming on this journey with me; responding to comments is honestly the most stressful part of writing fic imo but each and every comment has meant so much to me and it's been so wonderful to have y'all along for the ride. Aaaaaand if you'll notice, this work is now part of a series, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
> 
> And as promised, [here's a playlist for you](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6cDrum3sSRBnE89KHT1Jax?si=X7XGlF_zT6mxVgBlWWxWew), so now you can see my weird fucking music taste. It's in a totally random order because I always listen to it on shuffle and some of the songs aren't in English but c'est la vie.


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